Learn how to control, adjust and constantly develop your investment strategy based on the Investment Canvas.
Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.Brian Tracy, an American author who has written several books on success in business, sales and personal development
written by
Dr. Jan-Patrick Cap
The Controlling Block will help you to keep your strategy alive and revise it regularly. It also gives you the frame in which you manage your portfolio.
A man should control his life. Mine is controlling me.
Rudolph Valentino, an Italian actor, was an early sex symbol of the 1920s known in Hollywood as the "Latin lover"
You are not and will never be completely in control of your own destiny. This accounts for every aspect of your life, like your health, your kids, your wealth or your job. Our world is complex and we are not able to understand everything and even less to control it.
A very nice example of this is the so-called butterfly effect which says that a butterfly flaps its wings in China and sets off a tornado in Texas. Therefore, we have to let loose of the thought that we can control everything. The only option that we have is to accept that we cannot control everything. However, you need certain rules to follow to be successful - the right balance is necessary.
Learn in this chapter, what indicators, key decisions and rules are about.
When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.
Roy E. Disney, longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, son of Roy Oliver Disney and nephew of Walt Disney
After all, we learned for now that we cannot predict the exact market timings. However, also our portfolio is not static, the values changes, you learn something in the market and need to make adjustments. These adjustments should follow some logic, e.g. either you rebalance your portfolio when you see that a certain asset class is gaining value.
If that is the case your original asset allocation will change and you have to bring it back to the original plan. By this you take in profits and distribute it into other asset classes, this is a less risky variant and lets you stick to your original strategy. However, you might also revisit your strategy based on the learnings that you made during your investments.
When making investment decisions your emotions are often a reverse indicator of what you ought to be doing
Saying, unknown Author
An indicator is an observed value of something that is changing. Indicators are used in many aspects, e.g. you can analyze your blood and the different values are used as indicators for potential diseases. In finance there are many different indicators, e.g. many investors use the price-earnings ratio of a single stock to check if they think it is a good investment for them.
Other indicators may refer to the general economic situation and people use indicators like GDP growth to describe the current state of the market. Other examples of indicators include market risk indicators, trend indicators, fundamental/valuation indicators, portfolio risk indicators, etc. For indicators look at the specific section Indicators.
In this section, we will only look at indicators that refer to your investment portfolio and that keep you managing your strategy.
The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.
Mignon McLaughlin, an American journalist and author, worked for Vogue magazine in the 1940s, copy editor and managing editor of Glamour magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.
Indicators are just numbers that will leave the interpretation to the person who looks at them. But we also know that our judgment in terms of investing is not very good and based on feelings which are more often wrong than right.
Therefore, we define rules while we are not in a situation where we have to decide. We can follow these rules then which supports us in sticking to the original strategy and not going back to listening to our feelings.
Key decisions, indicators and rules are the basic neutral reflections of your strategy, that you should take into account regularly to control your investment. They will help you to become more independent from emotional decisions while investing.