Getting to Know Your Portfolio

With the recent market turbulence, I am sure a lot of you are anxious about your stock holdings and what you should do next. Your first step in making any decisions should be to understand what you own.

Barry Ritholtz wrote an article back in October 2005 titled, Apprenticed Investor: "How My Doin?", where he provided a spreadsheet. Rather than link to Barry's spreadsheet from here, I ask that you visit Barry's article. After completing his spreadsheet with each of your holdings allocated to a sector, you will clearly see how diversified you are. Moreover, you will see for each of your stocks its overall percentage of assets. You will also complete some standard valuation measures such as dividend yield, price to earnings ratio, projected growth, PEG ratio, and beta.

Another excellent source of information to be used in conjunction with Barry's spreadsheet is the S&P 500 website with quantitative data. With the S&P data and your spreadsheet, you can see whether or not you are overweighted in different sectors relative to the index.

If you are managing your own money, you are most likely weighted significantly different than the index. You have taken a deliberate strategy to be different. However, you should review your portfolio periodically and ensure that your current weighting reflects your intentions. Over time, your portfolio weightings will change as some sectors lose while others gain.

My portfolio has a large cash position relative to the overall portfolio. I have been purchasing more oil stocks during this current correction. And if prices continue to fall, I will purchase more. My intent is to be overweight commodities in general and oil related stocks in particular. Nonetheless, I still have stocks from other sectors. So I am not completely concentrated in commodities.

A correction is a good time to realign your portfolio. You should review your holdings to ensure that your overall portfolio reflects your current beliefs and desires. For example, if you believe that financials have been through the worst, you might begin to overweight the financials. As you think through your portfolio holdings, you can begin to think through different scenarios. For example, if the market falls another five percent, you plan to do x. If the markets rally hard, you plan to do y. The key point is to thoroughly review your stock holdings to make sure that you are comfortable with your current position.