How To Cure Your Addiction to Watching Stock Prices Every 10 Minutes
Simple strategies to help you win
Simple strategies to help you win
How often do you check your investment portfolio? If you are like most people, it’s a lot. It’s become an unwelcome habit. The appeal of constantly moving green and red numbers is too strong to resist. You are uneasy when the numbers are stationary — when the stock exchanges are closed.
It doesn’t always have to be this way. You can take back control and grow your money without endless stress. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
Moving stock prices need a response, the same way a screaming child needs attention. Each time you look at stock prices, you must respond in kind — either by buying, selling or holding. It’s challenging and exhausting having to make investment decisions every 10 minutes.
You can meet this challenge head-on by reducing the number of times you make decisions. It’s easier to say ‘no’ to anyone once than having to do it 10 times. The people you praise for great self-control aren’t that different from you—the weak and strong both struggle with self-control.
James Clear, author of Atomic habits, says
“Disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic will power and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations”.
The following pointers will help you spend less time in tempting situations.
Turn off your notifications
Last week I relapsed into my old stock price watching habit. All it took was one notification from Yahoo Finance app. A single notification undid months of progress. I couldn’t think straight once I was alerted that stock prices were in freefall.
These notifications instil a sense of panic when there has been a sharp decrease in prices. You never want to make investment decisions in such a state. Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist, says,
“intense emotions may lead us to make misguided decisions or outright disastrous ones”.
Delete the apps
Deleting your investment apps is a more serious commitment than silencing notifications. You will likely suffer some withdrawal symptoms at the start.
Deleting apps increases the pain threshold for accessing stock prices. Instead of quickly reaching for your smartphone, you have to go old school. Imagine the inconvenience of having to enter log in details on a laptop, find the website, enter login details for that website.
Don’t have your laptop autofill your usernames and passwords. Force yourself to enter them manually. Yes, it isn’t enjoyable entering login details each time, but that’s the point. It must put obstacles between you and those stock prices. Remember, self-control is overrated.
Schedule your viewing times
Freedom is more than the ability to make independent choices. All addicts choose — yet it’s that autonomy that leads to enslavement. James K.A. Smith says:
“If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence.”
You need to introduce some structure to your investing life. You should schedule a date and time for accessing your investment portfolio. In that allotted time frame, you can check stock prices to your heart’s content. I propose checking your stocks weekly.
With a weekly schedule, you engage the stock prices on your terms. It’s a planned encounter, no interruptions from Yahoo Finance alerts, that ruin your day.
Chose your friends wisely
It’s always good to have a trusted confidant who can keep you accountable. Permit them to check your progress. You can make it more interesting by introducing penalties for each time you relapse. The penalty is meant as a deterrent, maybe paying them $100 for each relapse.
On the subject of friends, avoid telling them which stocks you own. They will be the first ones to call you when your stocks are falling sharply. It’s just like friends to behave in this way. They like contacting you when your stocks are falling. Don’t exchange smartphone notifications for ‘friend’ text notifications.
Swap addictions
This last tip is not advisable but works. Desperate times call for desperate measures. You can swap time-wasting addictions — stock watching for strolling social media or binge-watching Netflix. It’s only meant as a hotfix — a temporary measure until you can develop healthier habits.
For me, I have swapped stock watching with an obsession for the Medium statistics page. It’s not ideal, but it keeps my mind preoccupied.
Aimlessly wasting time on the Medium statistics page hinders my productivity. I should be writing more. But, it’s better than stock price watching. Only one of those two leads me to panic sell my whole investment portfolio.
You want to avoid moving from one end of the spectrum to another — from looking at stock prices every 10 minutes to not looking at them at all. Either extreme is useless — don’t check them too much or too little. You can take control by increasing the pain threshold for accessing the stock prices and implementing a weekly schedule.
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