While buy-and-hold investors tend to do better in the long term, it is still essential to be smart even if you are not regularly monitoring your positions or the markets. Here are three things that such investors should consider doing during the rare times they manage or make changes to their investments.

Hold Actively Managed Funds

While data from Standard & Poor’s showed that more than 90% of actively managed large-cap funds could not keep up with the S&P 500’s performance in the last two decades, that result only involved the large-cap space.

If you look at the small- and mid-cap space, the success rate of owning specific actively managed funds against relevant benchmarks is often higher than in the large-cap area.

That is particularly true in the one- and three-year timeframe, where many small- and mid-cap fund managers appear to gain an advantage. The same can be said for global and emerging market funds, although it tends to be better.

Additionally, small-cap and international funds have a better long-term history than the large-cap ones, despite not being able to beat them each year. Still, that does not mean that long-term investors should only stick to actively managed small-cap and international funds.

Instead, the lesson is that those fund managers who deal with securities beyond the market’s lists of popular stocks can usually do what they need to do. And that is, find investment opportunities that other market players have not discovered yet.

Stay Invested in Predictable Stocks

Stay invested in companies that are predictable that they don’t necessarily need to be the headline for the day. While many consider themselves long-term investors, some of them are actually not. If you think looking for a publicly-traded company making headlines is research, it is not.

Companies featured on headlines of news reports could help corroborate the excellent performance for a certain amount of time, but not all the time.

For example, electric truck maker Nikola Corp. gained almost 1,000% in 2020 after its June initial public offering (IPO) via a special purpose acquisitions company (SPAC), VectoIQ Acquisition Corp.

However, that surge only lasted for a couple of days, and its shares price had now returned to where it was when Nikola was still VectoIQ. That development suggested that Nikola was not as ready to compete with Tesla Inc. as the optimism signaled at that time.

Invest in Companies That Will Evolve

Many companies can evolve, but not all of them are guaranteed to do so. It is crucial for businesses to evolve and adapt, as they are vital to their survival. If they are not causing the disruption themselves, they could be disrupted.

Take companies Eastman Kodak Co. and Polaroid Corp. as examples. Both companies dominated the camera industry, but their inability to evolve into digital photography eventually led to their fall.

Kodak finally filed for bankruptcy in 2021 after it was disrupted by digital cameras and was unable to leverage its brand name and intellectual property to deal with industrial, commercial, and professional video markets.

That was also when smartphone cameras demonstrated better digital imaging capabilities to become excellent alternatives.

Such inflexibility is contrary to brands like Google LLC. While it started as a simple search engine, its parent company Alphabet Inc. has strategically explored related businesses such as cloud computing, mobile operating systems, and digital entertainment, like online video-sharing platform YouTube.

Those showed broader uses of Google’s user base and fundamental capabilities and proved that Alphabet could embrace innovation to evolve and thrive.