Portfolio

Your portfolio is your complete collection of investments — stocks, bonds, funds, all of it, viewed as one machine. Thinking in portfolio terms (rather than obsessing over individual picks) is what separates investors from gamblers. The only questions that matter are about the whole: its mix, its cost, and whether it matches your goals.

Example: A classic starter portfolio: 80% stock index fund, 20% bond index fund, rebalanced back to those weights yearly.