Investment strategy

In finance, an investment strategy is a set of rules, behaviors or procedures, designed to guide an investor's selection of an investment portfolio. Individuals have different profit objectives, and their individual skills make different tactics and strategies appropriate. Some choices involve a tradeoff between risk and return. Most investors fall somewhere in between, accepting some risk for the expectation of higher returns. Investors frequently pick investments to hedge themselves against inflation. During periods of high inflation investments such as shares tend to perform less well in real terms. Time horizon of investments. Investments such as shares should be invested into with the time frame of a minimum of 5 years in mind. It is recommended in finance a minimum of 6 months to 12 months expenses in a rainy-day current account, giving instant access before investing in riskier investments than an instant access account. It is also recommended no more than 90% of your money in non-instant access shares. Unexpected expenses can happen. If someone does not have an income an income can be created by using share income funds. No strategy: Investors who don't have a strategy have been called Sheep. Arbitrary choices modeled on throwing darts at a page (referencing earlier decades when stock prices were listed daily in the newspapers) have been called Blind Folded Monkeys Throwing Darts [no source]. This famous test had debatable outcomes. Active vs Passive: Passive strategies like buy and hold and passive indexing are often used to minimize transaction costs. Passive investors don't believe it is possible to time the market. Active strategies such as momentum trading are an attempt to outperform benchmark indexes. Active investors believe they have the better than average skills. Momentum Trading: One strategy is to select investments based on their recent past performance. Stocks that had higher returns for the recent 3 to 12 months tend to continue to perform better for the next few months compared to the stocks that had lower returns for the recent 3 to 12 months.