Ask someone who has been investing for a while and there’s a good chance they will discuss the lessons learned along their investment journey. Many will reflect on their experiences and say that they wish they’d had a clear goal from the start as it would have saved them a lot of mistakes along the way.

Whether you’re new to investing or experienced, there is a lot to gain from following a few golden rules. Here are six of them to sharpen your approach.

1. Have a plan and stick to it

With thousands of stocks, funds and bonds available on the market, some investors make the mistake of having a scattergun approach to investing. It’s easy to pick the first investment you see without any thought to whether it’s right for you or what part it might play in a diversified portfolio.

It’s much better to sit down and work out what you want to achieve with investing before jumping in and making transactions.

Establish your investment goal. For example, if you’re putting money into a Lifetime ISA with the hope of saving up enough for a property deposit in five years’ time, you might not want to put money into higher risk investments. That’s different to someone who wants to squirrel away their money for 20 years as they have time on their side to ride the ups and downs of the market.

If you’re goal is to put a set amount of money into the stock market every month to build up wealth, try and stick to this plan even when markets are going through a bad patch as your money will go further if prices of stocks, funds and bonds are lower.

If you’re someone who is happy to trade in and out of shares, write down a plan for when you’re going to exit and stick to it. If things don’t work out as planned, move on. It’s all about having the right strategy for you.

2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Diversification is important when investing. If you only hold one or two individual investments, then the impact of a sudden market shock could destroy the value of your portfolio. Someone drawn in by the meme stock craze, for example, who bought shares in video games seller GameStop (GME:NYSE) at their height and nothing else would now be sitting on a loss of more than 70%. It you’d put money into bitcoin when it was trading above $50,000 your investment would have halved in value as the price has since dropped.

By investing in a spread of different holdings (anything up to 10 or 15 is probably a good rule of thumb) and a range of different asset types, you spread risk and have a cushion in case one or more holdings doesn’t work out as expected.

Investment trusts, funds or ETFs (exchange-traded funds) are a means of achieving diversification even if you do not have large amounts of cash at your disposal. And if you don’t want to or cannot hold bonds, commodities, property or other assets directly, it is still possible to get exposure to these asset classes indirectly through one of these vehicles.

3. Do your research

Before you invest in anything it is crucial to do your research. You should not let this paralyse you into inaction. You don’t need a PhD in biology before you invest in pharmaceutical giant GSK (GSK), for example. But at the very least you should confidently be able to answer the question: ‘How does it make money?’.

If you can’t, then how can you have any confidence in its ability to do so in the future? This is the major determining factor in whether an investment will turn out to be a success or a failure.

Big companies tend to have a lot of useful information on their websites – although clearly their take won’t be an objective one.

Other sources of information are the financial press, including Shares, as well as regulatory news updates. Smaller companies also present at events aimed at ordinary investors, where you can put questions to senior management.

The need to make informed decisions applies to funds too – you should have a clear idea of how they plan to deliver returns for holders. It’s also worth looking at how stocks or funds have performed in the past. It’s no guarantee of future performance but it still provides useful context for your investment decisions.

4. Try to understand what the market thinks

Often a share price will move in the opposite direction to what might be expected after giving what looks like on first glance ‘good’ or ‘bad’ news.

The reason is investors have probably already discounted the news in advance. What is important therefore is how a company delivers against expectations.

Expectations are captured by consensus sales and profit estimates provided by analysts and compiled by data groups such as Refinitiv. Some companies provide consensus analyst estimates on the investor section of their website or reference them on earnings updates.

Alternatively, they can be found on paid-for services such as Sharepad and Stockopedia.

Michael Mauboussin, a head of research at US investment bank Morgan Stanley, argues investors should always start with trying to figure out what is already factored into a share price.

For interested readers Mauboussin wrote a book about it called Expectations Investing.

5. Think like a business owner

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of stock prices winging around on a computer screen. But shares represent partial ownership of a company and have a claim on all future profit and cash flow.

This means investing is more akin to a marathon than a sprint and success should be measured over years not months. Thinking about the factors influencing the long-term success of a business is therefore more important than short-term gyrations in the share price. In the long run the share price will follow profits.

Developing a business owner mindset encourages rational thinking and provokes questions which lead to a better fundamental understanding of a business and its prospects.

Some of the world’s best companies such as Coca Cola (KO:NYSE) have been around for more than 100 years and that didn’t happen by accident.

It required making investment decisions which were expected to pay off in the long run, even if it meant hurting profits over the short term.

Some of the best investors are also business owners. Famed investor Warren Buffett says he is a better investor because he is a businessman and a better businessman because he is an investor.

6. Monitor your investments (just not every hour of
the day)

It is important to stay abreast of news and events which may impact the value of companies in your portfolio. Regular earnings updates are usually scheduled so setting alerts on the relevant date is a sensible thing to do.

Some investment platforms offer services which allow investors to set alerts if new news comes out or if there are unusually high trading volumes.

Broker notes can also have a big impact on share prices and there are services such as Research Tree which give retail investors access to them. Understanding the bull and bear case is useful for putting upgrades and downgrades into context.

Writing down the investment case when you first buy shares can be extremely helpful for gauging how an investment is evolving relative to original expectations.

Most investors are better at the buying side of things than the selling, so gathering data to show whether a holding is progressing or faces a deteriorating outlook is a good discipline.

It is better to stay steer clear of online message boards and rumours which can affect share prices but often tend to be short-lived and an unhelpful distraction.

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