No action is the best action?

In my 2018 year end’s review, I was perturbed that I had 111 transactions (28% sales) for the year. That works out to more than $2.4k in transaction fees, which is more than the prize money for striking 1st price of 4D with a $1 bet! More importantly, it does not reflect what I set out to be – a long term investor.

For the past quarter, I have a good start with zero transaction in January but the numbers jumped to 22 in the latest month, resulting in total transactions for the quarter to hit 31! No good but I foresee this as a temporary problem and I am unlikely to have another 22 transactions month.

Knowing that I have itchy fingers, I was curious also how things would be different if I did nothing as compared to my tracked performance. So at the beginning of the year, I set up a spreadsheet to track the performance of my 31 December 2018 portfolio if there is zero transaction done on it. The table below shows the comparison after one quarter. They are neck-to-neck after one quarter! Probably too short a time frame to see a big difference. Let’s see what will happen in the next few quarters.