Portfolio
Everything you own as investments, considered as one thing rather than separately.
A grand word for a simple thing: the sum of what you hold. Two funds and a savings account is a portfolio.
The reason the word exists is that investments should be judged together, not one at a time. A holding that swings wildly may reduce the overall swing of the whole, if it moves differently from everything else. Judged alone it looks reckless; judged as part of the set it may be doing something useful.
This is also why chasing the best-performing holding is a mistake. At any moment something you own will be doing worse than something else. That is not a fault to correct — it is what owning several different things looks like. If everything you hold rises and falls together, you own one thing in several costumes.
The number worth watching is the total, once a year or so. Watching individual holdings weekly invites tinkering, and tinkering is where most of the damage happens.
Related terms
Covered properly in Learn.
This term appears in the glossary of The Quiet Fortune, Volume I.