How often should you check the value of your portfolio?

As humans, we are inherently bad investors. We are prone to emotional decision making and find it hard to stick to a process. Back in September, I wrote a piece explaining that if we want to improve our chances of making better investment decisions we need to understand how and why we make decisions, especially those concerning money. In a way, we need to be a little less human.

We all have behavioural biases which can cause us to make the wrong or illogical decisions, even if we are presented with perfect information. One way to improve our chances of outperforming the market is to accept our biases and try to counter them.

One of the behavioural biases I discussed in a recent note was loss aversion. Loss aversion describes investors' preference to avoid losses over making gains of an equivalent size.