The rise of investment apps and real-time portfolio tracking has created a generation of investors who can—and often do—check their stocks dozens of times daily. But a growing contingent is pushing back, finding that less frequent market monitoring might actually be the secret to both better returns and improved mental health.
"I used to be glued to my phone," admits James Hernandez, a software engineer from Portland who now checks his investments just once a week on Sunday evenings. "The constant ups and downs were making me crazy. I'd see my portfolio drop two percent and start questioning my entire strategy."
He's not alone.
The phenomenon represents what behavioral finance experts call "myopic loss aversion"—our tendency to feel the pain of losses more acutely than the pleasure of equivalent gains, especially when we observe them frequently. Think about it: even in a strongly bullish market, stocks don't go up every single day. The more often you look, the more likely you'll catch those temporary downswings.
I've been covering personal finance for nearly a decade, and I've watched as smartphones transformed how we interact with our money. The ability to check investments anytime has been a mixed blessing, to put it mildly.
Dr. Lisa Kramer, a finance professor who studies investor psychology at the University of Toronto, told me that frequent portfolio checking creates an illusion of volatility that doesn't match market reality. "When investors monitor portfolios daily or hourly, they experience far more volatility than the actual long-term trend," she explained. "It's like watching waves crash on the shore versus viewing the ocean from space—same water, completely different perspective."
The math is straightforward (if rarely considered). If you check your investments daily, you'll witness roughly 250 market movements annually. Weekly checkers? Just 52. Monthly? A mere 12 opportunities to freak out about temporary blips.
But this isn't just about feeling better—though that's certainly important. There's mounting evidence that obsessive portfolio checking leads to worse investment outcomes.
Consider a landmark study from UC Berkeley that tracked investors over a 7-year period. The findings? Those who traded most frequently underperformed the market by nearly 7% annually. Ouch.
Why? Because frequent monitoring tends to trigger more transactions, and more transactions typically lead to...well, disaster for the average investor's returns. We buy high (when we're feeling optimistic after seeing gains) and sell low (when panic sets in during downturns).
Look, I get it. There's something addictive about watching your net worth tick up and down. The markets have been gamified—complete with red and green colors, percentage changes, and charts that mimic video game interfaces. It's designed to keep you engaged.
But engagement isn't always aligned with good financial outcomes.
Take Martin Sewell, a 42-year-old accountant who switched to weekly portfolio reviews last year. "The first few weeks were honestly tough—like breaking any habit," he told me over coffee last month. "But after a while, I found myself making more thoughtful decisions instead of reactive ones."
His experience highlights an uncomfortable truth: for most investment strategies, daily market information is mostly noise. By creating artificial distance, weekly checkers are essentially filtering out low-value data.
This approach creates a middle ground between two extremes. On one side, you have the day-traders and CNBC devotees who treat investing like a spectator sport (complete with heroes, villains, and dramatic play-by-play commentary). On the other, you have the "set it and forget it" passive investors who might check their accounts annually during tax season.
A weekly check-in offers enough separation for emotional perspective while maintaining sufficient engagement to be an active investor.
Of course, this strategy isn't appropriate for everyone. If you're a professional trader or work in finance, constant monitoring might be part of your job description. Some folks genuinely enjoy following daily market movements—it's entertainment as much as investment. That's perfectly fine! (Though being honest with yourself about whether that entertainment comes at a financial cost is probably worthwhile.)
What's particularly interesting about this weekly approach is how it mirrors the habits of many successful professional investors. I've interviewed dozens of portfolio managers over the years, and the best ones share an almost supernatural ability to focus on their investment process while tuning out market noise.
They're not obsessively checking if they're outperforming some benchmark every hour. They're reading, thinking, and analyzing with much longer time horizons than the average retail investor.
There might be a broader lesson here about attention as our scarcest resource in modern life. In a world engineered to capture and monetize our focus, choosing where NOT to direct our attention might be as important as choosing where to direct it.
So if you find yourself compulsively checking your investments and it's affecting your peace of mind, try an experiment: limit yourself to once-weekly reviews for a month. Your portfolio won't feel neglected, I promise. And you might just discover you're making better decisions with a clearer head.
After all, most of us started investing to build wealth and security—not to create another source of anxiety in our already stressful lives.
