I started investing a few months ago and now I can’t stop checking the prices. It’s got to the point I’m checking my stocks at work, at home, in the car. It’s become a habit and I don’t know how to stop. Any advice?
First, I’d like to suggest that if this compulsion to check the value of your investments is interfering with your life – your relationship, job, ability to drive safely – then it would be a good idea to seek counselling. When an urge grows into a habit and then into an addiction it can negatively affect your life. If it’s starting to feel like you’re losing control of this impulse to check stock prices, then it may be time to see a therapist.
With that said, what you are describing sounds like a new behaviour and patterns like this one (checking stock prices frequently) is not uncommon with people new to investing.
When you start investing it is all new and exciting, and it makes sense to want to keep track of the money you’ve put into your investment accounts, to see how it is doing. However, as you’ve no doubt discovered, checking the prices multiple times a day doesn’t offer any benefit to you and the behaviour distracts you from other things.
Typically when we impulsively check information over and over (whether it’s stock prices, airplane take-off times, weather reports, or the number of days until Christmas) it’s because we are either excited or afraid. With investing, it’s often a case of both because, on any given day, we don’t know if the stock is going to rise or fall.
If you continue to check asset prices week after week and month after month – if the novelty isn’t wearing off – then I suspect it’s an indication that you are investing outside of your comfort zone. In other words, you’re either invested in ETFs or stocks that are too volatile and risky for you; or you’ve invested too much too quickly.
Put another way, if you invested $10 in a one-year guaranteed investment certificate (GIC) for a 5% return, you probably wouldn’t be checking its value every day. It would continue to be the same boring $10 for the entire year and then give you back $10.50 at the end of the year. There would be no thrill in checking it. But if you invested $1,000,000 in a risky stock that might crash or shoot up 50%, then it’s hard to look away from the hourly stock updates because, at any moment, you might be gaining or losing $100,000 in a matter of weeks!
My suggestion would be, if the compulsion to check stocks doesn’t ease off over time, to re-evaluate how much you can comfortably invest and at what risk level. If you’re currently in individual stocks, consider a less risky approach like a market index fund which tracks the performance of the overall market. If that still feels too risky, look at guaranteed investments (like GICs).
Investing is a long-term game, one which usually lasts for decades. Your investments should be something you set up and then review about once a year to make sure everything is running as planned. Investing isn’t something you should be checking on every month, day, or hour. Good investments tend to be “set and forget” where you get the ball rolling and then leave for the rest of the year. So my advice is to either decrease the amount of money you have invested or decrease the risk until your investments are something you find pleasantly boring and no longer wish to check on multiple times a day.
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