Suppose you were on a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Bombay and heard the following announcement: “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’re now traveling west across the Pacific Ocean. In a few hours, you’ll be able to look down and see land. When that happens, we’re going to start looking for a big city with an airport. If we find one before our fuel runs out, we’ll land. Then we’ll figure out where we are and decide where we go next. In the meantime, folks, just sit back and enjoy the trip.”

Well, would you? No, probably not.

And you won’t enjoy the trip you’ll end up taking if you don’t keep a close eye on your fund’s performance either. Just like the airline captain – who has a plane, fuel, passengers, and a destination - you might have all the component parts of a successful mutual fund portfolio. But if you don’t have a plan to track where you’re going and where you’ve been, you’ll find yourself flying around aimlessly trying to find somewhere to land.

That's why it's so important to monitor your investments on a regular basis. In a way, your investment money has become your employee, and that makes you the boss. And like any good manager, you'll want to keep a close watch on how your employee, your money, is doing.

Some people like to look at the stock quotations every day to see how their investments have done. That's probably too often. You may get too caught up in the ups and downs of the "trading" value of your investment, and sell when its value goes down temporarily - even though the performance of the company is still stellar. Remember, you need to be in this game for the long haul.

Some people prefer to see how they're doing once a year. That's probably not often enough. What's best for you will most likely be somewhere in between, based on your goals and your investments.

But it's not enough to simply check an investment's performance. You should compare that performance against an index of similar investments over the same period of time. You should also compare the fees and commissions that you're paying to what other investment professionals charge.

And while monitoring performance regularly is one part of the role of a good investor, you also need to pay close attention every time you make a decision to put some of your hard-earned cash into another investment.

Every time you buy or sell an investment you will receive a confirmation slip or email from your broker. Make sure each trade was completed according to your instructions. Make sure the buying or selling price was what your broker quoted. And make sure the commissions or fees are what your broker said they would be.

Watch out for "unauthorized" trades in your account. If you get a confirmation slip for a transaction that you didn't approve beforehand, call your broker. It may have been a mistake. If it happens more than once, or if your broker refuses to correct it, call the SEC or your state securities regulator.

Keeping tables on your portfolio depends at least in part on how you’ve decided to structure your investments. But regardless of the kind of portfolio you’ve decided to create, monitoring the rising and falling prices of stocks is an essential part of being a successful investor or stock trader.

At the minimum, investors should check performance, costs and fees once or twice a year and re-examine their contribution schedule. Investors in individual shares should keep a much closer eye on the financial pages, but probably don’t need to look every day unless they are actively trading.

Key Tip: To help you keep track of your investments and trends in the market, you may want to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or Barrons. Both are available in print and online on the Internet. Publications like these will provide you with specific data related to your investments, and will also help keep you on top of news and events that might affect your portfolio and your decision-making process.