Successful Investing - Stop Losing Money and Stick With a Long Term Strategy With These 5 Tips

Why do some people always make money while others lose? What do you need to do to make your portfolio successful over time? It helps if you have self-efficacy or the unshakable belief in knowing that you have what it takes to succeed whether or not you have the right skills. Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura first described this behavior in the 1970s. Persistent effort, too, can help you as well as these 5 tips to successful investing:

1. Create an environment for success. For example, you can't build a portfolio of investments if you have no tools to track your performance and asset allocation. There are lots of free and low cost web tools to help you track what you bought, how much it cost, and the average annual return you are getting. Get the right information, software, web tools, etc. to help you organize all of your accounts -cash, pensions, and brokerage accounts.

2. Have good role models. You can't do it alone so make sure you have the support of significant others, successful mentors, or a coach. A good investment plan starts with a clear vision of why you are buying in the first place and what conditions would have to happen for you to sell.
I want to make money-- isn't an investment plan. I want to retire in 20 years with $40,000 annual income coming from investment and pension accounts-- is.

3. Avoid self limiting beliefs. If you lose money don't assume that you will never be able to make money again. Successful people have had many failures. Keep investing and adding money to your portfolio anyway-learn from your mistakes and move forward.

Don't be fooled into thinking that there are good times and bad times to invest. It is always a good time to invest because the alternative---doing nothing leads to a guaranteed loss due to taxes and inflation.

4. Don't allow losses to derail your dreams. Keep your eye on the target you set. For example, I want x amount of money in x years. Know that during those years not everything is going to be going up at the same time- and that's a good thing. Diversification is an easy proven money making long term strategy. Diversify over asset classes (large-cap, mid-cap, small cap, international, etc.) and asset styles (growth, value, balanced, etc.)

5. Believe in yourself and your portfolio. If you have a retirement plan strategy that is not on target, ask yourself if something fundamentally has changed. If not, leave it alone. Believe that you did the right thing to begin with and believe in your plan to see it through.

With determination you can model the behavior of those that are successful. With the right support system and tools, you can develop the optimism that's needed to recover from failures, and market downturns. Follow these 5 tips and you will stop losing money and become the successful investor that you want to be.