1. Identify the purpose of your strategy. Are you trying to build a Canadian large cap strategy or a bond ladder?
2. Keep your strategies focused on a single purpose. Don't try to build complex strategies that contain multiple asset classes. This just makes things too complex and hard to build and maintain.
3. Develop a set of rules that the strategy will follow. Advisors with the best rules will be the biggest winners.
4. Backtest your rules. Although backtests do not guarantee future results, they are useful to determine if your rules have worked in the past. Yogi Berra once said "You can observe a lot just by watching."
5. Compare your results to a relevant benchmark. Does your strategy consistently outperform the benchmark? If not, it is back to the drawing board.
6. Do some additional analysis. Compare performance during good and bad markets. Stress test your portfolios. Calculations like up market capture and down market capture, beta, etc. are useful metrics.
7. Implement your strategies. There is nothing like real-time trading to build confidence in your strategies. Most people will naturally take this step slowly.
8. Be 100% disciplined. You didn't do all this work to allow yourself to sabotage performance.
9. Monitor the performance of your strategies. Quarterly reviews are probably frequent enough. Try not to make frequent changes.
10. Compare your strategies to existing strategies, like mutual funds or ETFs. You should constantly compare your individual strategies to each other. Relative strength and one-year performance are great tools to help you see which strategies are working and which to over weight or under weight. Your job is to stay objective and not fall in love with strategies. If an ETF provides better performance for a purpose, you have to go with that instead of yours. Don't fall in love with strategies - that's not very objective.
11. Outsource if it is outside of your capabilities. You can probably manage asset classes like large cap Canadian or US Equities or bond ladders but you should outsource such things as international equities. You need to be a specialist to be successful.