How Often Is Too Often to Check?

When it comes to checking your investment’s performance, various factors such as your appetite for risk, investment horizon and liquidity needs influence how frequently you should do this.

Imagine a sliding scale:

Where there’s a shorter-term objective, and a need to draw income from your investment (say, post-retirement), more frequent checks make sense. “You could keep an eye on it once a quarter,” says Glacier Research.

But where you have a longer time horizon, Glacier’s research team says you won’t gain much value from checking more often than once a year. “Generally, for more aggressive investment strategies, especially if you’re a young investor, consider performance over a longer period,” they explain.

A Key Consideration: Your Fund Objective

Your fund objective goes hand in hand with understanding your investment’s annual performance. Glacier Research uses two different scenarios on opposite ends of the risk and strategy spectrum to illustrate this:

Investor A

Investor A is a retiree, with a shorter time horizon, and perhaps needs to draw an income from their investment.

Fund risk profile: conservative.

Fund objective: outperform a cash-related index, e.g., the Short-Term Fixed Interest Index (STeFI) plus a certain percentage, or outperform inflation (CPI) by a certain percentage (depending on your income drawdown rate).

“The primary objective of this type of strategy is naturally not to deliver very high returns,” notes Glacier Research, “but instead to protect the value of capital.” When measuring the performance of the strategy, the benchmark is low from a returns perspective, but you would place much more emphasis on the risk. “If the strategy has delivered, for example, no negative performances over a six-month period, or over an annual period, you might say that that fund has actually achieved its goal because of those objectives,” they say.

Investor B

Investor B is younger, with time on their side, and in the accumulation phase of investing.

Fund risk profile: aggressive.

Fund objective: outperform an equities benchmark, like the MSCI World Benchmark.

With this type of strategy, you are focusing on generating good returns over the longer term, so performance would be measured on more of a relative basis.

Why It Pays to Partner With Experts

Your investment statement and fund fact sheet include indicators of how your chosen funds have performed over a long period, but to gain a richer, more detailed understanding, it pays to lean on your adviser and the resources they have access to. For example, investing through the Glacier investment platform, your adviser has access to a specialist research team who can share certain insights about funds on the investment platform that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to, and using these, build a robust tailored investment solution suited to your needs. “These insights include the best views on which funds we think are most appropriate across different categories,” the Glacier Research team explains. “We provide insights for advisers using the investment platform, and who need support. That adds a lot of value for the investor.”

And when it comes to choosing the underlying investments for your solution? By enlisting Glacier’s investment platform capabilities, your adviser has unparalleled choice. “There are hundreds of funds available on the investment platform, and if you think about it in terms of investment theory, if you’ve got a wider breadth of opportunities, and all things remain equal, then it should lead to better returns over time for you as the investor,” says the Glacier Research team.

Glacier’s investment platform gives you access to leading local and international investment opportunities, meaning your adviser can customise your fund selection for ultimate personalisation, putting you at the centre of it.

Ask your adviser why you’re not with Glacier.