This week, I’m talking about 5 more mistakes that smart investors don’t make in bear markets. 

In today’s uncertain world, it’s tempting to check how the stock market is doing more often, get sucked in to CNBC, refresh your favorite news app every 14 minutes, and check on your investment portfolio every day.

But some of the most savvy investors I know rarely check on how their portfolio is doing. I checked my own portfolio for the first time since this crisis started a couple weeks ago, and I haven’t looked since. I only check on my own portfolio a handful of times in a given year. I know what I own. I keep tabs on it, but I don’t micromanage it, and that’s key. 

When you micromanage your portfolio and check it often, you’re more likely to trade frequently and more importantly, you’re more likely to to fall victim to an important concept in psychology called negativity bias. 

Negativity bias is a theory that negative events elicit more rapid and more prominent responses than non-negative events. Basically we have a stronger reaction to bad news compared to good news. It’s why we focus more on past insults than past compliments, and in regards to your money, why the pain of a loss of 10% carries more weight than the pleasure of a gain of 10%.

When you look at your portfolio more often, you’re more likely to see a loss, especially in times like now when the stock market has more down days than up days. In fact, over the last 50 years, if you checked on the stock market every day, you would only see a gain about 54% of the days. That means 46% - nearly half of the days - were down.

You can see how easy it would be to get down when even in the best of times, the stock market still frequently has bad days. 

But if you only checked on your portfolio once a year, you’d see a gain about 70% of the time, and because of negativity bias, you would feel a lot better about how your portfolio is faring compared to the micromanager who watches every uptick and downtick in their portfolio. 

So if you must check on how your portfolio is doing, be sure to check on things after the stock market closes for the day, and after a good day in the stock market, when you’re likely to see a positive uptick in your own portfolio. Your mental and emotional health will thank you. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening. My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip. 

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