Robert Brokamp

It's never the number one, it's never the bottom, but it's a nice smooth ride.

As people begin to receive their year-end statements, there's always how their portfolio or that specific account performed.

And there's usually a benchmark in there somewhere.

It might be the S&P 500.

It might be some MSCI index.

And it always occurs to me that in many ways, those benchmarks aren't appropriate, right?

This portfolio may have cash and bonds and international stocks.

Why are you comparing it to the S&P 500?

Do you think benchmarking is all that important, like to compare yourself relative to some index, or is it more important just to make sure you have enough money to accomplish your financial goals?

To get it this time, I think it's challenging to benchmark your portfolio against the S&P 500 because it is basically been the asset class of choice over the last five, 10 years, right?

US large cap stocks have outperformed just about everything.

So if you had international, if you had small caps, if you had value, and of course, if you had cash and bonds, that was a drag on your portfolio, but that doesn't mean it was inappropriate for your situation.

So I think that's important context, because if you do benchmark the S&P 500, you're probably going to not look so great if you had a well-diversified portfolio, but it still might have been the right choice for you.

You mentioned having a stinker of a target date fund.

So let's move on to how you look at your individual investments and decide whether to keep them or not.

Obviously, with any form of mutual fund or ETF, you want to benchmark it against others within that category.

You want to do the apples to apples comparison, ideally over three to five years, maybe longer, just to make sure that you are outperforming that category or not.

You probably should just go with an index version.

But how else do you look at all your investments, your funds, your stocks, your things like that?

You go line by line?