Equity Portfolio Construction Workbook: Building and Stress-Testing Your Stock Portfolio

Understanding portfolio construction principles is the starting point; translating those principles into a specific portfolio — with defined positions, weighting rationale, rebalancing rules, and documented risk parameters — requires working through the decisions with real numbers. This workbook course guides you through the full portfolio design and stress-testing process using structured exercises and templates. By the end of this course you will be able to define your portfolio's investment policy in a written one-page statement, evaluate an existing portfolio's sector concentration and factor tilts, design a rebalancing protocol with trigger rules and execution guidelines, and stress-test a portfolio against three historical market scenarios to assess drawdown exposure. What you will learn: - Writing an investment policy statement: target allocation, rebalancing rules, and risk parameters in one page - Auditing an existing portfolio: calculating current sector weights, geographic exposure, and factor tilts - Identifying hidden concentration: how overlapping positions in ETFs and individual stocks create unexpected exposure - Designing a rebalancing protocol: calendar-based versus threshold-based and how to execute efficiently - Stress-testing against historical scenarios: modeling portfolio behavior during a 30% drawdown using historical analogs - Factor exposure analysis: evaluating tilt toward value, growth, small-cap, or quality across a portfolio - Tax-aware rebalancing: how to rebalance while minimizing taxable realizations in a taxable account - Portfolio review cadence: what to review monthly, quarterly, and annually Each module provides a fictional portfolio scenario — variously overweighted in technology, underexposed internationally, or carrying overlapping ETF positions — and guides you through diagnosing the issue and designing the correction with a structured worksheet. Templates for an investment policy statement, a portfolio audit table, and a rebalancing decision log are included. A final capstone exercise asks you to design a portfolio from scratch for a fictional investor profile. This course is written for individual investors who have an existing equity portfolio or are building one, students in financial planning or investment management programs, and advisors who want structured templates for client portfolio construction. Familiarity with basic stock concepts is assumed. This course is informational and educational; it does not constitute investment advice.