By Gabriele Denaro · Published 16 July 2026 · Updated 6 October 2026
In 1995 the economists Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler described "myopic loss aversion": people feel losses more strongly than equal gains, and the more often they evaluate their investments, the more losses they see. Together the two make stocks feel riskier than they have been over the long run. In a 1997 experiment Uri Gneezy and Jan Potters found the same pattern: participants who saw their results more often took less risk. Both papers study how looking changes behavior. Neither tells you how often you should look.
Over a single day a market is mostly noise. It falls on plenty of days, and when you check daily you notice every one of them. Over years the odds tilt toward gains. If you look every day you live inside the noisy part, and every dip arrives as news. If you look once a month you see a smoother line and have fewer reasons to act.
The risk is not the checking itself but the decision it provokes. After a sharp drop the temptation is to sell and wait for calm. After a rally it is to buy more because everyone else seems to be winning. Neither impulse is a plan. The research shows that the pull gets stronger with frequent evaluation, not that you will inevitably give in to it.
No study says that a month is the right interval. It is a practical middle: often enough to notice that something real changed, such as an account that stopped growing, and rarely enough to ignore a bad week. If your money sits in long-term investments you may be fine looking even less often.
Remove price alerts and keep the broker app off your home screen. Look on your monthly date, enter the figures and write one line if something moved by more than you expected. If only the price changed, and your goal and timeline did not, a bad month is rarely a reason to act. If your situation changed, for example you now need the money in a year, that is a reason, and it has nothing to do with the price.
General educational information, not personal financial, tax or legal advice. It may be incomplete or out of date. Terms of use.