The Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly & Annual Routines

First published 26 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Anjana Shrestha checks her phone at 10:58 in the morning, two minutes before NEPSE opens. She is not glued to the screen. She works as a credit officer at a commercial bank in Kathmandu, and her real job does not pause for the stock market. But for four years now, she has run a small, disciplined portfolio worth about eleven lakh rupees, built slowly out of her salary savings and two Dashain bonuses, spread across a handful of banking shares, one hydropower company, an insurance stock, and a microfinance institution she has followed since it listed.

What makes Anjana different from most retail investors on the floor of Nepal's stock market is not that she is smarter or has inside information. It is that she has a system. She knows exactly what she looks at every single day, what she reviews every week, what she checks every month, what she re-examines every quarter, and what she overhauls once a year. She calls this her "operating cadence" — a private joke borrowed from her bank's internal audit language, but the term fits. A cadence is a repeating rhythm, like a drumbeat that keeps a marching band in step. Without one, an investor either checks the market obsessively out of anxiety, or forgets about it entirely until something goes wrong. Anjana does neither. She has turned investing into a series of small, scheduled habits, and this chapter is going to show you exactly how she built that system, one layer at a time, across a real calendar year.

This chapter is the opening chapter of Part XVII, "The Investment Constitution & Personal Operating System." Everything you have learned in this book so far — how to read a balance sheet, how to score a company using the Canon Score, how circuit filters work, how dividends and bonus shares are taxed — is a tool. Tools sitting in a toolbox do nothing. What turns a toolbox into a working discipline is a routine: a fixed schedule that tells you which tool to pick up, and when. That is what we build now.

Lesson 94.1 — The Daily Routine: Five Minutes, Not Five Hours

Let us start with the most dangerous habit in Nepali retail investing: watching the NEPSE index and your portfolio's live price movements all day, every trading day, refreshing the TMS (Trading Management System, the online platform brokers use for placing buy and sell orders) app every few minutes. This is not discipline. It is anxiety dressed up as diligence, and it is the single fastest way to turn a long-term investor into an emotional day-trader who did not mean to become one.

Anjana's daily routine takes about five to seven minutes, almost always done twice: once around midday during her lunch break, and once in the evening after the market closes at 3:00 PM. She does three things, in this exact order.

First, she checks prices and circuit status, not to react, but to record. A circuit filter is a rule that automatically halts trading in a stock (or halts the whole market) once its price moves up or down by a fixed percentage in a single day — in Nepal this is commonly a 5 percent daily move for individual scrips relative to the previous closing price, with different, tighter bands for close-to-open moves, and a market-wide circuit breaker that can pause the entire exchange if the NEPSE index falls sharply. Anjana glances at whether any of her holdings hit the upper circuit (meaning it rose the maximum allowed and buyers are still waiting, unable to get filled) or the lower circuit (meaning it fell the maximum allowed and sellers are stuck, unable to exit). She writes the closing price of each holding into a simple spreadsheet. That is all. She is not deciding to buy or sell based on this glance — she is simply keeping a record, the way a doctor takes a patient's temperature every day without necessarily prescribing new medicine each time.

Second, she does a short news scan — not financial news in general, but specifically company notices filed through NEPSE and the Securities Board of Nepal (SEBON), the regulator that oversees the stock market and enforces disclosure rules. Listed companies are required to publish material information — board meeting notices, book closure dates, dividend announcements, right share issues, changes in senior management, major litigation — through the exchange's notice board and through Mero Share (the online system, operated by CDSC, the Central Depository System and Clearing Limited, that lets investors apply for IPOs, right shares, and view their share balances) or through public disclosures picked up by financial portals. Anjana scans headlines only for the eight to ten companies she owns or watches. She is not reading market gossip on social media or investment Facebook groups. She has a firm personal rule: no decision is made off a rumour, only off an official notice.

Third — and this is the step most investors skip — she runs what she calls her "impulse check." Before she is allowed to place any trade that was not already planned as part of her weekly or monthly review, she must write down, in a notes app, the answer to one question: what specific new fact, not feeling, is driving this trade? If she cannot name a specific fact — a filed disclosure, a dividend notice, a re-scoring trigger — she is not allowed to place the order that day. This single rule has saved her from her worst instincts more times than any analysis ever has.

Anjana's daily habit is deliberately boring. Boring is the point. A daily routine in investing should feel closer to brushing your teeth than to gambling — small, quick, protective, and almost unconscious once it becomes a habit. The goal of the daily check is not to find opportunities. It is to stay informed enough that you are never blindsided, while keeping your hands off the keyboard unless a real, pre-planned reason exists to act.

There is a second reason the daily routine matters, beyond discipline: it builds pattern recognition slowly and safely. When Anjana's hydropower stock hit the upper circuit three days running last Ashwin, her daily log let her see the pattern building day by day, rather than discovering it retroactively as a shock. She did not chase the stock during the run — her rule said no impulse trades — but she flagged it clearly for her weekly review, which is where real decisions get made.

Lesson 94.2 — The Weekly Routine: Portfolio Review Against the Canon Score

If the daily routine is about staying calm and informed, the weekly routine is where Anjana actually thinks. Every Friday evening, after the market closes for the week (NEPSE trades Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday as the weekend in Nepal), she spends thirty to forty-five minutes doing a structured review of her entire portfolio.

The centrepiece of this review is what earlier chapters of this book called the Canon Score — the composite scoring framework you built to evaluate a company across governance quality, financial health, growth durability, dividend consistency, and valuation relative to its own history and its sector. Recall that the Canon Score is not a single magic number pulled from thin air; it is your own structured tally, built from concrete inputs such as promoter and institutional shareholding stability, return on equity trends, debt-to-equity levels appropriate to the company's sector (a hydropower company will carry more debt than a bank, and a bank carries more "debt" in the form of deposits than either), dividend payout history across at least three to five years, and a valuation check such as price-to-book or price-to-earnings compared against sector peers. The weekly review does not recalculate this full score from scratch — that would be far too much work for a weekly cadence, and it is not necessary, because a company's underlying fundamentals do not change meaningfully week to week. Instead, the weekly review asks a narrower question: has anything happened this week that would change an input into that score?

Anjana keeps a simple table, one row per holding, and updates it every Friday.

Notice what this table is doing. It is not asking Anjana to re-read four years of annual reports every Friday. It is asking her to be a good record-keeper: did anything happen this week that touches one of the pillars of the score? A price movement alone, with no disclosed reason, is a "watch" trigger, not an automatic score change — remember, price is what the market is willing to pay, and the Canon Score is about what the business is actually worth and how well it is run. Confusing the two is one of the fastest ways to make a bad decision look rational.

The second half of Anjana's weekly routine is watchlist maintenance. A watchlist is simply the list of companies you do not yet own but are tracking, because you believe they might eventually earn a place in your portfolio once their price or their fundamentals line up with your standards. Anjana keeps twelve companies on her watchlist — mostly commercial banks and insurers she has scored highly but currently considers overpriced relative to their history, plus two hydropower companies she is waiting to see complete at least one full monsoon and dry season cycle of actual generation data before trusting their earnings numbers.

Every week, she asks three questions about the watchlist: has the price moved closer to or further from my target entry range; has any new disclosure changed my initial score estimate; and is anything on this list stale — meaning she has not looked at it properly in more than two months and should either refresh her thinking or drop it, because a watchlist that never gets pruned becomes a graveyard of good intentions rather than a useful tool.

The weekly routine, done consistently, does something subtle but powerful over a year: it trains your eye to separate signal from noise in small, low-stakes weekly doses, so that by the time a genuinely important event happens — a major disclosure, a sudden governance concern, a sector-wide policy shift from Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB, the central bank that regulates commercial banks, development banks, and finance companies, and whose monetary policy directives on interest rates, spread rates, and capital requirements move banking and finance sector share prices significantly) — you already have the habit of checking facts calmly rather than reacting on instinct.

Lesson 94.3 — The Monthly Routine: Dividends, AGMs, and Rebalancing

Once a month, on the first Saturday, Anjana sets aside a full ninety minutes — longer than any single weekly session — because the monthly routine handles things that simply do not arise every week: dividend and Annual General Meeting (AGM) tracking, and rebalancing.

An AGM is the yearly meeting where a company's shareholders formally approve the previous year's financial statements, approve the dividend the board has proposed, and elect or re-elect directors. Before an AGM (and before a dividend payment), a company announces a book closure date — the specific date on which the company "freezes" its shareholder register to determine exactly who is entitled to receive the dividend or bonus shares, or to vote at the AGM. If you sell your shares before the book closure date, the buyer receives the dividend, not you; if you hold through the book closure date, you receive it even if you sell the very next day. This single mechanical fact causes enormous confusion among new investors, and enormous mistiming among impatient ones — some investors sell right after book closure purely to "capture" the dividend and reinvest elsewhere, a maneuver worth understanding but not worth chasing blindly, since share prices often adjust downward around book closure to reflect the value being paid out.

Anjana's monthly calendar tracking works like this. Nepali companies typically hold their AGMs and declare dividends in the months following the close of their fiscal year (which for most companies runs roughly mid-July to mid-July under the Nepali calendar, ending around Ashadh), so dividend season tends to cluster in Nepal from around Mangsir through Falgun, though timing varies by company and by how quickly SEBON and the regulator approve each company's audited statements. She keeps a monthly calendar — a simple table, refreshed at the start of every month — listing each holding, its expected AGM window based on prior years, and any book closure notice already filed.

Once dividends are declared and paid, they typically arrive as bonus shares (additional shares credited directly to your demat account, held with your DP, or Depository Participant — the broker or institution that maintains your electronic share holding record through CDSC), cash dividends (credited to your bank account), or a combination of both. Anjana's monthly routine includes confirming that dividends she is owed have actually been credited — checking her Mero Share portal and her bank statement — because reconciliation errors, while not common, do happen, and catching them within a month is far easier than trying to sort them out a year later.

The second half of the monthly session is rebalancing — the process of checking whether your actual portfolio, as it exists today, still matches the allocation you intended, and trimming or adding where it has drifted. Because share prices move at different rates, a portfolio that started as 40 percent banking, 25 percent hydropower, 20 percent insurance, and 15 percent microfinance can quietly become 55 percent banking simply because your banking shares had a strong run while everything else was flat — not because you made any new decision to concentrate that heavily.

Anjana rebalances using a simple threshold rule: she only takes action if any single sector has drifted more than eight percentage points away from her intended target, or if any single company has grown to represent more than 20 percent of her total portfolio value regardless of sector. This threshold approach matters because it prevents two opposite mistakes — tinkering constantly with small trades that rack up brokerage commissions and capital gains tax events for no real benefit, and letting concentration risk build up silently until a single company's bad quarter can meaningfully damage her entire portfolio.

Lesson 94.4 — The Quarterly Routine: Re-Scoring Against Fresh Disclosures

Every three months, Anjana does the heaviest single piece of recurring work in her entire system: a full re-score of every holding using the company's latest quarterly financial disclosure. Listed Nepali companies are required to publish unaudited quarterly financial reports — covering income, expenses, profit, and key ratios — within a set number of days after each quarter ends, and these reports are publicly available through NEPSE's disclosure system and through Mero Share. This is the richest single source of fresh, factual information an ordinary retail investor gets access to during the year, and building your quarterly routine around it is far more productive than reacting to daily price noise.

The quarterly re-score session takes Anjana a full weekend afternoon, sometimes stretching across two days. For each holding, she pulls the latest quarterly report and re-checks the same pillars that make up the Canon Score: has net profit grown, shrunk, or stayed flat compared to the same quarter last year (comparing to the same quarter last year matters enormously in a seasonal economy like Nepal's, where, for instance, hydropower companies generate far more revenue in the monsoon-fed high-water months than in the dry winter months, and comparing a dry-season quarter to a monsoon quarter would be misleading); has the company's earnings per share moved; has its distributable profit and reserve position changed in a way that affects its ability to pay future dividends; and, critically, has anything changed in governance — a new auditor's note, a related-party transaction disclosure, a change in senior management, or any flag from SEBON.

The second half of the quarterly routine is peer comparison — placing each of your holdings side by side with its closest sector competitors to see whether it is still earning its place in your portfolio relative to the alternatives available on the exchange. This matters because a company can look perfectly fine in isolation while quietly falling behind its peers in profitability, efficiency, or governance quality — and a Canon Score that only ever looks inward, never sideways, can miss that kind of relative decline.

This table told Anjana something her daily and weekly routines never could have surfaced on their own: Everest Microfinance had slipped to dead last among the five microfinance institutions she tracks, with a negative profit trend two quarters running, driven by rising loan-loss provisioning across the sector following an NRB directive tightening microfinance lending standards. No single day's price movement had signalled this — the stock had actually been range-bound, not crashing — but the quarterly fundamentals told a clear story that the daily price chart could not.

This is the deepest value of the quarterly cadence: it forces you to look at your holdings against the full universe of realistic alternatives, on a schedule frequent enough to catch genuine deterioration early, but infrequent enough that you are not whipsawed by every single data release.

Lesson 94.5 — The Annual Routine: Constitution Review, Tax Planning, and Goal Reassessment

Once a year — Anjana does hers in the week after Nepali New Year, in mid-April, which conveniently falls a few months after most companies have completed their AGMs and after the fiscal year transition period has settled — she runs the biggest review of all: a full audit of her entire portfolio's constitution, her tax position, and her personal financial goals.

The word "constitution" here is deliberate, and it is the bridge to the next chapter of this book. A constitution, in the context this book will build in Chapter 95, is a written personal document — your own rules for what you will and will not do as an investor, your target allocations, your risk limits, your criteria for buying and selling. The annual review is when Anjana checks her actual behaviour across the past twelve months against that written document, and either confirms the rules still serve her or consciously revises them.

The tax planning component draws directly on the material covered earlier in this book, in Chapters 35 through 38, on how capital gains and dividend income from listed shares are taxed in Nepal. Recall the essential structure: capital gains on listed shares held for more than 365 days are generally taxed at a lower long-term rate than gains on shares held for 365 days or less, which are taxed at a higher short-term rate, and these rates and holding-period rules are set by the Government of Nepal's tax law and can be revised in the annual budget, so an investor must reconfirm the current rates each year rather than assume they are fixed forever. Dividend income, similarly, is subject to its own withholding tax treatment, typically deducted at source before the dividend reaches your account, meaning much of the dividend tax obligation is already settled by the time you see the credit, but this still needs to be reconciled against your annual tax filing.

Anjana's annual tax planning session involves pulling a full-year transaction statement from her broker and from Mero Share, tallying every sale, noting the holding period of each lot sold (this matters because if she bought the same company's shares on different dates, the tax treatment can depend on which specific lot is considered sold — a detail worth confirming with her broker or a tax professional each year rather than guessing), and estimating her total tax liability for the year before it comes as a surprise at filing time. She also uses this session to think, deliberately, about tax-aware timing for the year ahead — for instance, whether a position she is planning to trim anyway is close to crossing the long-term holding threshold, in which case waiting a few more weeks before selling could meaningfully change the tax rate applied to that gain. This is not tax evasion; it is legal, sensible timing, exactly the kind of planning Chapters 35 through 38 addressed in depth.

The final piece of the annual routine is goal reassessment. Anjana opened her very first brokerage account with a specific goal: building a down payment fund for an apartment within seven to ten years, alongside a smaller, separate goal of building retirement savings that supplements her employer pension. Once a year, she asks honestly whether her portfolio's actual trajectory, her personal life circumstances (a promotion, a marriage, a new dependent, a change in her risk tolerance), and her original goals are still aligned. Goals are not static. A twenty-six-year-old's appropriate risk tolerance and time horizon look different from a thirty-four-year-old's, especially if life circumstances have shifted — a new mortgage, a parent needing financial support, a child on the way. The annual routine is where Anjana permits herself to revisit and, if genuinely warranted, revise her target allocations, her acceptable risk limits, and even her definition of what "enough" looks like for each goal.

This last row deserves emphasis. Once a year, for every single holding, Anjana forces herself to answer one blunt question: if I did not already own this, would I buy it today, at today's price, knowing everything I now know? This is sometimes called a "fresh eyes" test, and it exists specifically to counter a well-documented human bias — the tendency to keep holding something simply because you already hold it, a pattern investing psychology calls the endowment effect, where owning something makes us value it more than we would if we were considering it as a new purchase. The annual routine, done honestly, cuts through that bias once a year, even when the weekly and monthly routines, focused on incremental change, might not have forced the question directly.

Lesson 94.6 — Building Your Own Operating System: Putting the Calendar Together

We have now walked through five separate rhythms — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual — each serving a distinct purpose. It is worth being explicit about why five separate cadences are necessary rather than, say, one big weekly review that tries to do everything, or a purely annual check-in that ignores the rest of the year.

Each cadence exists because the underlying information it responds to changes at a different natural speed. Prices and circuit filters change every single trading day — so the daily routine matches that speed, but deliberately does almost nothing beyond recording and calming yourself, because a single day's price movement rarely carries enough real information to justify action. Portfolio composition and watchlist relevance shift gradually over a week as news trickles in — so the weekly routine matches that speed with a light-touch score check and disciplined record-keeping. Dividends, AGMs, and allocation drift operate on a monthly rhythm tied to the corporate calendar and simple compounding of price differences — so the monthly routine matches that. Financial fundamentals genuinely change only every three months, when new disclosed numbers arrive — so the quarterly routine, the heaviest single working session, matches that speed exactly, no faster and no slower. And your own life circumstances, tax law, and long-term goals shift slowly, over the scale of a year — so the annual routine, the deepest and most reflective, matches that.

Putting all five together into a single annual calendar is the real deliverable of this chapter. Below is the master calendar Anjana actually keeps taped inside the cover of her investment notebook — feel free to treat it as a starting template and adjust the specific triggers to your own portfolio's realities.

One year of running this system does not make Anjana a market expert, and it will not make you one either. What it does is something more durable: it replaces a chaotic, emotion-driven relationship with the stock market with a calm, structured one, where every action has a clear trigger and every silence — every day she does not trade — is also a deliberate, informed choice rather than mere inertia or fear.

There is a final point worth making before we close this chapter, because it will matter enormously in the chapter that follows. A routine like this one only stays disciplined if it is anchored to something written down — fixed rules you commit to in a calm moment, so that in a stressful moment (a sudden circuit-hitting crash, an unexpected windfall from a bonus share, a friend's excited tip about a "sure thing" stock) you have something firmer than your own mood to fall back on. Anjana's weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sessions all ultimately refer back to one document: her own written investment constitution, the rules she set for herself about allocation limits, scoring thresholds, tax approach, and goals. Building that document — properly, completely, in your own words, for your own life — is the task of the next chapter.