Two more steps I am using on my current portfolio

This second trading cum investing post is to include some plans that weren't mentioned in the earlier post.

1) I calculated the projected dividends starting last year. Based on the dividends from the year before, or from Bloomberg app, I calculated the dividends I am expected to have if I did nothing and let the portfolio stay on auto-pilot. This number helps me by letting me know realistically how much dividends I am getting. With it, I can decide if it is too high and needs to be higher. This helps me decide whether to buy into more dividend-bearing or REITs. This helps me focus as I do look at the stock prices everyday. This would help me focus and look out for more buy opportunities for these counters.

2) Taking a controlled-loss to off-set against gains made this year. This is a way for me to help slowly weed out the losers in my portfolio. The reason being the maxim ' Sell the losers and buy the winners'. Unfortunately, most of us do the opposite and actually keep the losers in the portfolio (did not have stop-loss) and sell the winners. The problem doing this is that your portfolio becomes filled with losers over time. As for the losers in my portfolio, I have missed the stop-loss range and mainly because I didn't have an exit strategy in my vocabulary, I have sat on them for quite a while. This year, I am playing around with this step to help me slowly get used to making losses (as small as I can, but still I have to be realistic) from slowly and gradually getting rid of these losers in my portfolio and off-setting them against the gains I have made. So that the effect on me is two-fold. First, my portfolio over time can become healthier, cos the losers are sold off and the capital, though reduced, can be put into the winners. Second, this helps me overcome the loss-aversion by getting me repeatedly having to deal with some loss and this keeps reminding me, in the face, why I SHOULD have had a Stop-loss in place. Cos the losses are definitely bigger than the stop-loss amount if I had done so. The downside is my actual annual gains are lowered cos used to off-set against the losses which has accumulated over the years. This should drive me to make better and smarter buy-decisions, come up with stop-loss target before I buy anything. This process will take some time to see results but I need to learn about the stop-loss mentality and internalise this to avoid more of this sitting on losses.

I am in the midst of starting to read up about trading of stocks with a couple of books. Am trying to adopt certain concepts and come up with a more comprehensive plan. My goal for my portfolio is 10% nett returns and the final and higher goal is 20% return.