Investors in the stock market who have a long time-horizon shall keep a close eye on their investments, but there are better ways than checking your portfolio every day. Let’s start looking at the disadvantages of checking your portfolio value every day before going into the available alternative.

Four disadvantages of checking your stock portfolio daily when you have a long investment horizon:

1) It takes you every day a few minutes that do not bring you any positive results. Five minutes per working day is more than an hour per month that you can spend in a more fruitful way.

2) It creates unnecessary emotions. Nobody feels good to see their portfolio value declining compared to the previous day. And this will happen very often, even during an uptrend.

3) Spending these 5 minutes per day on looking at your portfolio can give you this false feeling of that you monitoring your investments closely and well. It can prevent you from looking at the big picture and the bigger trends by looking all the time from to close by.

4) When you check your portfolio daily, you are more inclined to trade on impulses and to buy and sell to early.

Before I started to use the Stock Trend Investing system, I had the urge every day to check how my stock investment portfolio was doing. Every day I logged into Morningstar (.com in the US; .co.uk in the UK; etcetera), to see which of my funds went up or down and what my profit was on each mutual fund.

Feeling good when not checking your portfolio daily

Now, I check my portfolio value and status only once per month. And I am full at ease and have a feeling of being fully in control of my investments in the stock market in doing so. Why is that?

Two reasons:

a) I have selected a number of reliable index and mutual funds that have shown over several years a steady performance on par or better than the corresponding market indices. There is no reason to believe why they would start underperforming within a matter of months, and definitely not within a period of weeks or days.

b) I do not base any trading decisions on daily or weekly fluctuations. Following the Stock Trend Investing system, I only evaluate at the end of every month if I shall make any changes in my stock market investments. When capitalizing on the longer term trends in the market, there is absolutely no need to trade more often. Note that most months, I decide to leave things as they are do not buy or sell anything.

Do you see any clear advantages of checking your stock portfolio daily? Please share your views by commenting on this blog post.