Novice Investing - How Many Stock Is Enough?

Date: Thursday 20th 2008f November 2008 04:10:21 PM

How Many Stock Is Enough? - 12/9/2005

By: Hari Wibowo

For most investors, they have their full time job other than watching the stock price movement daily. Stock is investments not jobs. However, that does not mean you should ignore your stock after you have bought it. You have already put your egg in a basket and your job now is to watch it.

Periodic monitoring is needed for any investments. Ideally, you need to get updates of your holdings every three months. This is the period when they report quarterly earnings. This poses another question. If we hold a day job during the weekdays and only have a few hours to spare on the weekend, how many stocks should we ideally hold?

There are people that can research stocks fairly quickly. There are those that can't. The general guidelines however, it will take one weekend to get updated with one of your current holding. Assuming you do one stock each weekend and you have your 'free' time during two other weekends, therefore, you can hold a maximum of eleven stocks. This is because you have to evaluate your holdings every thirteen weeks.

What about diversification? Should we buy more stocks to diversify our risk? Yes, we need to diversify. But what is the use of buying investments that you didn't research ? If you have no time to research then don't buy it. It is not worth your time. As stated previously, every investors have different speed of evaluating their stock investment. The more experienced investors are generally faster than novice investors. If you can evaluate two stock holdings every weekend, then you can afford to buy 22 different stocks without having to neglect them. This guideline applies to any other form of investment. Put your egg in your basket and then watch them.




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Disclaimer: The sole purpose of this article is educational. This article is merely the opinion of the writer and is not in any way a buy/sell recommendation regarding any securities.

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