Hi all,
In an effort to educate myself and "get my feet wet" before creating a long-term investing plan(Index funds, individual stocks, etc), I created an Investopedia mock portfolio about a month ago. My stock portfolio is doing slightly worse than the market and I certainly could start selling and making transactions, but I don't think that's going to teach me anything valuable. It's not possible to truly replicate market behaviour over the course of a month or even three and I'm looking for opinions on how I could use a mock portfolio to my better prepare myself. What questions should I be trying to answer and what's a reasonable length of time to maintain the portfolio before actually buying stocks? And yes, I do plan to buy stock index funds, in addition to individual stocks, as a part of my core portfolio strategy.
I read somewhere that it's not a good idea to replicate one's index portfolio with individual stocks. I expect some overlap to take place if I choose a broad market ETF or index fund. I can't seem to find a way around avoiding this overlap. Do you have any suggestions regarding going into common stocks when most of the companies are going to be tracked by an ETF or a specialty ETF in my portfolio?
Many thanks!