The working routine: daily, weekly, monthly and annually

Professional practice is unglamorous and mostly consists of doing a small number of things on a schedule instead of many things reactively.

The counterintuitive starting point

For a position based investor, more screen time produces worse results. Watching a chart does not change it, and it substantially increases the chance you will act on noise. The routine below is designed to bound your involvement, not to expand it.

If your approach genuinely requires continuous attention, it is a job rather than an investment strategy, and it should be evaluated as one, including whether the hourly return is acceptable.

Daily, ten to twenty minutes

• Check any position with an active risk level, a stop, a liquidation price, an expiring order. This is the only genuinely time sensitive item.
• Scan headlines for the specific things that would change a thesis: an exchange in difficulty, a protocol exploited, a regulatory decision on something you hold. Not general market commentary.
• Log any decision you took, while the reason is still accurate.
• That is the entire list. Not checking prices repeatedly, not reading sentiment, not looking for ideas. Those feel like work and are the activities most reliably associated with worse outcomes.

Weekly, thirty to sixty minutes

1. Portfolio review against targets. Has any tier drifted past its band? Is any single position now oversized through growth?
2. Check the coming week's known events. Unlocks on anything you hold, scheduled upgrades, major macroeconomic dates.
3. Review open theses briefly. Anything that materially changed? Any kill criterion triggered?
4. Update the journal with anything not captured daily.
5. One research block. A defined period on a single question, not open ended browsing.

Monthly, one to two hours

• The journal review in full: tag decisions, count emotional states, check calibration, extract one rule.
• Performance against benchmark, including fees.
• Rebalance if any band is breached, mechanically rather than by judgement.
• Security review. The one everybody skips, below.
• Record keeping. Export transactions for the month. Reconstructing a year of records in April is genuinely miserable and frequently inaccurate.

The monthly security check

Quarterly and annually

Quarterly: the wider review of whether the approach is working, whether you followed your own policy, and whether the policy itself needs amending. Rebalance on schedule. Reassess your total allocation against your circumstances, which change more than markets do.

Annually: full performance measurement after fees and tax against the benchmark. Tax filing from records you have kept as you went. A full rewrite of the policy document rather than an edit, because rewriting forces you to justify each rule again. And a genuine review of your custody setup, which tends to be outgrown quietly as holdings grow.

What this adds up to

Roughly fifteen minutes daily, an hour weekly, two hours monthly. Under a hundred hours a year, most of it scheduled and unexciting. That is what the practice actually looks like, and it outperforms constant attention by a wide margin because it removes the decisions that constant attention exists to produce.

Common questions

How often should I check my crypto portfolio?

Daily only for positions with active risk levels, weekly for the portfolio as a whole. More frequent checking does not improve decisions and reliably increases acting on noise.

What should a monthly crypto routine include?

A journal review, performance against benchmark, rebalancing if bands are breached, a security check including revoking stale approvals, and exporting transaction records.

How much time does managing crypto properly take?

Around fifteen minutes daily, an hour weekly and two hours monthly, so under a hundred hours a year. Most of it is scheduled and unexciting, which is the point.