They say you shouldn’t watch your stock portfolio daily, you should just check on it every couple of weeks (barring those days when something truly dramatic happens e.g. 1987, 2008, etc.).
Why? Because a decent investment strategy should be exactly that. Decent. This means, by definition, that it doesn’t need a lot of fiddling around. You should just be able to wind it up and let it go do its thing.
Which is why most day traders lose their money eventually. All that constant checking in makes them volatile investors. Which makes them more likely to panic sell and panic buy at precisely the wrong time. Which they do.
The same is true with the current crisis. We already kinda know where we are, we’ve already self-isolated, we’ve already loaded up on canned food and pasta, and pulled our kids out of school. All there is to do now is stay at home and wait for the storm to pass. Sure, one should keep one’s ear to the ground, but there’s no point checking the news feed every fifteen minutes- all that will do is increase anxiety, without increasing the supply of actual useful information.
Less is more.
