I check my portfolio too often. There, I said it.
I do this for a living and I still catch myself pulling up accounts on my phone like it’s a Georgia Bulldogs football score I need to keep track of. It’s not a score. And nothing I see on a random Tuesday afternoon is going to change a single thing I do. I have a plan and I’m sticking to it.
Here’s the problem with checking every day: you’re paying for information you can’t use. The market was down .8% today. Okay. Now what? Are you going to overhaul your retirement plan because of a Tuesday? Of course not. So all you bought yourself was a little jolt of stress, free of charge.
Here’s the deeper problem: your brain is working against you. It evolved over thousands of years to spot threats, follow the herd, and react fast. Great instincts as a caveman, terrible ones in a brokerage account. Every alarm bell that kept your ancestors alive now tells you to sell exactly when everyone else is selling. Barry Ritholtz has written about this for years: successful investing is mostly the discipline of overriding your own wiring.
Nobody checks their portfolio daily and feels calmer for it. You either feel good for no good reason or bad for no good reason, and both feelings tempt you to tinker. Tinkering is where returns go to die.
Have a plan written down somewhere so that when the market does something dramatic, and it will, you’ve already decided what to do about it, which is usually nothing.
Your advisor should be monitoring for long-term trends that may require a plan update. Remember that it’s less about you versus the market and more about you vs your own behavior.
