How to Manage Your DIY Portfolio While on Vacation

Earlier this month, we talked about our 21-Day Summer Trip Around the UK and many seem to wonder how we are able to take care and manage our DIY Portfolio while enjoying rather extensive vacation.

So, the big question this time is what do we do with our holdings when we get away from home for 3 long weeks?

Those who know us already anticipated our short answer which simply is: nothing different!

For starters, we never take a lot of time to manage our portfolio and sure don’t have to monitor it on a day-to-day basis. We normally take only a couple minutes each week to look at our holdings and set up upcoming operations.

If we are available, we usually like to manually process our stock buying and selling. From time to time, we still must rely on automatic orders like when we know we will be busy working. Programmed orders can always be bypassed if more time becomes available afterwards.   

We just treat trips or vacation as completely booked periods. Three fully-occupied workweeks would be handled the same as three weeks of vacation.

So, before our summer trip, being on a buying mode, we simply set up buying orders on selected stocks from our Watch List that would trigger at specific thresholds. Using our own tool, we typically like to buy stocks that would reach a Dip Factor of 3, 3.5 or 4. For your information, no orders were triggered during our latest trip.

With internet now accessible from almost anywhere, if necessary, we could access our online brokerage accounts and input transactions while on vacation. Then again, privacy may be an issue. One more reason we prefer not to.

A quick anecdote. We were in the US a couple years back when markets plunged because of one of the debt-ceiling crisis. US media was talking about it all the time. Being there, we felt the pressure even more and were tempted to consider selling some of our stocks. We were fulling invested at the time and we had no buying or selling orders set up. Being on vacation with limited internet access, we had no way to manually input transactions on our autopilot portfolio. In the end, we were very fortunate we had no opportunity to give into the panic because markets went back up a few days later after the crisis was resolved.

We are very proud to limit time we spend managing our DIY Portfolio. Our conservative passive style of investing sure helps us accomplish so. It also allows us to always enjoy our vacation a little more!

Photo by Lady C