How much time a week do you spend on investments

[Loving Life]

Well, I been semi -retired for a few years, and for my retirement accounts, I check daily or so on quicken, and adjust as needed based on my models.

For my trading account, I spend a couple of hours a day trading (yes, I have been a day trader for a few years in between jobs and assignments) up to 8 hours a day depending on the market conditions.

 

[Dcharles]

WOW! I did not realize most of the folks on this sight spend so much time watching the markets. I'm just an engineer type and I don't really understand nor trust the market stuff. For me........I just hope my FA can do well and keep us out of trouble. ha! How naive is that? Ha!

 

[whitestick]

The checking account that I use requires a monthly ACH transfer in of money, so I have to log into my brokerage account once a month to do that. While there, I glance at my accounts, sell new calls if required, run the filter for new stock candidates to see if anything pops up, sell puts against them to enter a position if any candidate appears, then log out. Probably about 1 - 1 1/2 hour a month. Of course at tax time, I have to go back and pull a dump of the years records and produce a schedule D, but I'm assuming you're not asking about that.
After all I'm retired, not wanting another career in stock trading.

 

[Telly]

About 30 minutes once a month. I do a monthly tally up, and I also have a % Equity indicator in the spreadsheet, so I can get an idea if I'm getting near a rebalance point. In one of the worksheets I have a scratch pad area for rebalancing that is keyed in to all of the funds, so I can easily twiddle some possibilities.

As the early retirement years have gone by, the urge to look at stuff has declined, probably because I am doing okay.

 

[Ronstar]

I spend about a half hour during the weekend to update my spreadsheet for end of week totals. Maybe once or twice a year I'll do a few hours of research. My plan is to increase research soon in order to rebalance.

 

[frayne]

I track my investments on Morningstar and will check it when there are a big swings in either direction in the market. I have pretty much a set and forget portfolio and only rebalance once or twice a year. Time spent during a normal week, less than 10 minutes.

 

[donheff]

I spend almost no time actually "reviewing, tweaking, studying, shifting assets, building spreadsheets, etc, etc.". But I spend a lot of time reading about financial matters, and look at my portfolio spreadsheet almost daily and periodically log in to financial accounts to verify. I.E, I like to check in to make sure it is all still there but I don't mess with it.

 

[Fermion]

I am paranoid someone is going to hack one of my taxable investing accounts, sell all my VTI and buy 500,000 shares of a penny stock at the ask price. I don't know how I would fix this but I want to know about it as soon as possible so I check all of my accounts at least twice a week.

 

[Car-Guy]

I check this site out 3 or 4 times a week (maybe 10 mins per visit) and spend about an hour a day on Boglelheads. Add another hour or two per week reading about investing and/or tax laws on the Internet. I'll spend another couple of hours a month monitoring accounts and maintaining spreadsheets.

 

[MDJO]

Probably about an hour per day reading and researching new ideas. But I enjoy doing this, did it for years before I retired, and continue to do so. Check in with the indexes several times a day on my smartphone.

 

[HFWR]

Very little. I look at it daily, on a google spreadsheet, and log on to my real account a couple of times a month, to adjust my spreadsheet for dividends.

 

[Lsbcal]

I have a bank of 5 computers that run separate market strategies. Have been doing this for about the last 5 years. Most of this is highly automated and I only check results a few times daily. The most successful strategy involves moving between a broad based US etf and an international one. Most days I'm up around +0.5% per account but the compounding is impressive. I've never discussed the algorithms with others but they are based on some non-Euclidian constructs.

If your jaw was dropping at the above, it is only my day-dreams. But it was fun to write this up. Hope you enjoyed it.

In truth (no kidding) I maintain several Excel spreadsheets:
1) One sheet showing all holdings with a linked sheet that sets the allocations. This helps me to keep things in balance. Updated weekly but only need to rebalance maybe a few times per year. I do not rebalance if the market is heading down.
2) One fairly complex set of linked sheets with a gentle market timing algorithm that backtests pretty well over decades and would have me switch occasionally between some selected asset classes. It also has a get-out-of-the-market strategy that only triggers every 4 or 5 years on average. This latter one is optional and is based on equity-bond performance, PE10, and most importantly the yield curve. Big green light at present.

 

[imoldernu]

"How-much-time-a-week-do-you-spend-on-investments?

Not smart enough to have "investments" that would change, so very little time.
With some small exceptions, all liquid assets are in annuities, Ibonds, CD IRA's, or savings, so our risk is in inflation. Once a year check up.

But I do watch the market, read 5 or 6 news letters, and CNBC, FBN and Bloomberg. Fun to watch, even with no dog in the fight.

I enjoy reading the downside warriors... Roubini, Krugman Ty Durden and Charles Hugh Smith... just for perspective.

 

[Options]

I calculate net worth and spending activity on the last day of every month and record into a spreadsheet. If there's any rebalancing ill do it as well. All told its about an hour a month. But for fun I'll spend several hours a day reading about finance, talking about business deals, etc. simply because it's a hobby.

+1

 

[sengsational]

I have an automated way to pull an inverstment value / allocation, but I only run it when there's posts on this board about how good or bad the market is doing. I watch zero TV, so this is how I know if something is going on. But I will run it once per quarter. That timing came from when it took hours to complete. Now it only takes 10 minutes, and most of that is waiting for it to run. But as other have been saying, I spend a lot of time reading stuff, and I'm taking the Stanford online class now, which takes a lot of time.

 

[clifp]

All told probably 1-2 hours a day counting reading and responding to the money portions of ER.org. I check my account, daily. Once a month when the Dividend investor newsletter arrives I review my holdings in light of recommendations. I generally spend at least an hour and often two to three hours before purchasing a new stock. I also read both Morningstar articles and the WSJ more or less daily.

Two to three times a year I update my expected income spreadsheet,and my net worth calculations.

Still I think most of my investment money time is spent read and responding on the forum.

 

[NW-Bound]

I no longer watch much TV let alone CNBC. However, when I am not RV'ing or up in my 2nd home, I tend to spend quite a bit of time on the Web. I also listen to no radio, so the Web is my window into the world for everything. I have also cancelled all of my printed subscriptions. I guess I spend a few hours each day on the Web, except when I have no access (and that's often by choice).

Time spent on the Web is for surfing this forum but also to BS and not just to glean some tidbits of financial wisdom. I also use the Web to get info from news media, but that's to follow political news and macroeconomic trends, not really for stock info.

Though I have quite a few individual stocks, I buy with the intention of holding for long terms. I have no spreadsheets. I relied on MS Money, and now Quicken for performance tracking. If a stock suddenly deviated significantly from the pack, I would investigate then decide what to do about it. Else, I would let it be and only look at the longer term performance. I do look at my Quicken screen several times a day. I need to look at Quicken for expense and credit card tracking also.

 

[jebmke]

15 minutes a week to check for fraud

 

[easysurfer]

I spend very little time as I like to keep things simple. Index funds and just look at how the allocations are doing once a quarter and rebalance once a year.

 

[check6]

As an active trader I spend several hours a day.