If you manage your own money, there's no advisor to question. The person to question is you.
The person managing your portfolio should not be the person grading the portfolio. For a self-directed investor, those are the same person. You chose the holdings, set the allocation, and decide whether it's working. You believe your approach works — that's why you self-direct. But belief and measurement aren't the same thing, and nobody grades their own paper objectively.
These five questions are easy to ask and hard to answer honestly.
It's natural to judge a good year against whatever makes it look good, and a bad year against whatever makes it look forgivable. A benchmark chosen after the fact isn't a benchmark. It's a justification.
An honest answer requires: a benchmark you can name, that matches your allocation, and that you'd have picked before you saw a single result.
A balance that grew 20% in a year you added a lot of new money says little about how your investments did. Your contributions are mixed in with your results.
An honest answer requires: a return calculated with deposits and withdrawals stripped out — not a balance comparison.
Two investors can earn the same return with very different swings along the way. If you only know the return, you only know half of the result.
An honest answer requires: a measure of risk — how much your portfolio moved relative to its benchmark, and how much return you earned for those moves.
Most people do. The stock that tripled is a story you tell. The one you sold at a loss is easy to forget. Memory isn't a performance record.
An honest answer requires: the full record — every buy, sell, and cash flow — measured as a whole, rather than the highlights you recall.
Imagine a stranger showed you your exact numbers: the return, the swings, the comparison to a matched benchmark. Would you be impressed? Unsure? It's a far easier question to answer about someone else.
An honest answer requires: looking at your numbers the way you'd look at anyone else's — by the measurements, not the story behind them.
None of these questions is about whether you should change anything. They're about whether you actually know how your approach is performing — or whether you're assuming. An independent measurement answers the parts you can't answer objectively yourself.
WiseMint measures your time-weighted return, Sharpe ratio, alpha, beta, and up/down capture against a benchmark you choose — independently.
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Related: 5 Questions to Ask About Your Advisor's Performance Report