I spent a few minutes yesterday looking at how my various investments are doing relative to each other. Because I hadn't looked in on progress in a while I wanted to see whether any particular investment (or investments) had been doing better than others. If one or more individual securities do well - or one or more perform poorly - then it might be time to rebalance that portfolio.

It's a fairly easy process, especially if your broker provides a nice pie chart of your investments on your portfolio summary page like mine does. I just look to see if any of the pieces of pie are significantly larger or smaller than the average slice. If your broker doesn't show these pie charts, they're easy to construct with your favorite spreadsheet program. Just use your most recent brokerage statement and create a pie chart of your holdings.

For the most part my investments were not out of line this time around. The one exception was my 401(k), where all investment had performed equally well except one - the Emerging Markets fund. The slice representing Emerging Markets had grown to be about twice the size of all the others.

Because this was my 401(k) account, I didn't need to worry about taxes. I simply started clicking my mouse and entering percentages. After about 5 minutes I was once again in balance.

I wonder which security will outperform all the others next time I check?