Why You Shouldn’t Check the Market Daily

First things first: this article is designed for individuals who incorporate longer-term holds as part of their wealth strategy and are looking for clarity amidst shorter-term market noise. 

It’s not intended for those who exclusively trade on shorter time horizons and really know what they’re doing to have consistent success at that. (These traders do exist – even if they’re a minority.)

Specifically, it’s written for:

• Those who invest regularly but don’t trade frequently
• Those using passive or index-based strategies as a core allocation
• Those who don’t have the time or interest to trade or track markets daily
• Those transitioning from day trading or active speculation toward a longer-term mindset
• Those who believe that markets work best when left alone
• Those who recognize that most financial success comes from behavior, not making predictions or market timing (which is almost impossible for those not on the professional side of the market, and even then it’s necessarily easy or reliable)
• Those who want to protect their peace of mind while still building serious wealth
• Those curious why checking prices often doesn’t align with actual investment logic

If you’re checking the stock market every day, hoping to make sense of every wiggle on a chart – pause. 

The market doesn’t work on your schedule, nor does it reward vigilance for vigilance’s sake.

It rewards patience, habit, and time.

Let’s walk through why reacting constantly to markets can not only hurt your peace of mind but also erode your potential returns. 

And why the odds are, in fact, stacked against the individual who tries to “out-think” the system while not having any actual edge.

Key Takeaways – Why You Shouldn’t Check the Market Daily

• Daily Moves Can Be 50x+ Louder Than Daily Earnings – If equities yield ~5.75% annually, that’s just ~0.016% per day. Yet markets often move 1–2% daily, overwhelming the real signal (earnings) with noise. You’re reacting to motion, not meaning.
  
• Short-Term Prices Reflect Sentiment, Not Value – Most daily market moves are driven by macro shifts, risk rebalancing, or sentiment flows, not actual changes to long-term earnings. If you’re investing in businesses, daily pricing is mostly irrelevant.
  
• You’re Mostly Trading Against Highly Optimized Machines – Even if trades are “free,” you’re paying in spread, slippage, and being front-run. Institutional players use your behavior as data – you are the edge they monetize.
  
• Compounding Wins, Not Timing – It’s time + discipline + habit. Market checks don’t improve this outcome – staying the course does.
  
• Don’t Try to Compete in a Game You’re Not Practicing Full-Time – Professional traders use quant models, execution algos, research teams, and other advantages that make it hard for individuals to compete. It’s like playing a sport against top-level pros and expecting to win. They effectively have a statistical edge over the average Joe and lower-level athletes. Markets work the same way.
• Active Trading Is Still Possible – Active traders can absolutely have great success, but they do so with a defined, repeatable edge. Reaching that level is not unlike training to become a professional athlete: it takes years of skill-building, discipline, and refinement to compete at the top.

The Earnings Yield Perspective: What Are You Really Getting Paid?

Your Daily Earnings? It’s Not Much

If the earnings yield on equities is 5.75% annually (it varies), what does that mean day-to-day?

• Daily: 5.75% / 365 ≈ 0.01575% per day
• Weekly: ≈ 0.1103% per week
• Monthly: ≈ 0.479% per month
• Quarterly: ≈ 1.44% per quarter

These are your expected returns assuming no capital gain or loss volatility, just earnings power. 

If you want to be inappropriately precise (i.e., because the “yields” of stocks are not contractually obligated), that means for every $1 million you have invested in stocks (if an earnings yields of 5.75% annually), you’re making around $157 per day, or around $4,700 per month (pre-tax).

For doing nothing (passive indexing).

Now take these yields and compare them to what you see on those timeframes.

Stocks can easily move 1-2% (or more) in a day. That’s 50x or more the daily earnings.

They can easily move around a few percent a week.

The signal is low; the noise is high.

Every time you check the market hoping for a meaningful “update,” you’re chasing noise. The information is just not meaningful to you if you’re long-term.

However, will notice that ratio (volatility to earnings) compressing the longer the timeframe.

If the earnings yield is 5.75% and the annual volatility (expressed as a standard deviation is 15%), the ratio is lower than the ~50x on the daily timeframe (provided a daily standard deviation of around 1%).

Relative to Macro Forces, The Earnings Are Tiny

Daily or weekly returns are dwarfed by the macro drivers we covered here:

• Changes in discounted growth expectations
• Changes in discounted inflation
• Shifts in risk premiums
• Movements in discount rates

These are large forces that are more influential in the short run than earnings. 

What you’re seeing in short-term price changes are often just market participants rebalancing their allocation and risk, not keeping the market in line with those who are in it for earnings alone.

Earnings are most influential over the long run.

Why Market Watching Feeds a False Sense of Control

The Illusion of Insight

You’ll encounter talking heads, articles, TV/internet personalities — all offering conflicting market opinions. 

A 50/50 up/down market opinion isn’t insightful. They don’t know; they’re just guessing. 

If heads, they “knew” it. If tails, they forget it or other factors they didn’t anticipate caused it to be wrong (which is the idea).

Trading it well is not 50/50. It’s less than that.

And it’s not just “I predicted this” but what you do once you’re in the trade or what you do when you’re out of it (how do you re-allocate).

Markets are designed to have disagreement. That’s how they function. Everyone has different motivations for participating in markets.

Some are investing savings, some are attracted to the movement and are trading/speculating, some are hedging, and so on. 

So what should you do if you’re not an active trader?

Let the System Work for You

The market already prices in consensus expectations.

Some think:

• “The economy is bad” = stocks should be bad
• “The economy is good” = stocks should be good

It doesn’t work like that. All information is already priced in.

If you own a broad index, you’re receiving the 50th percentile result. 

That’s the mean outcome, and that’s pretty good. 

If you try to chase better, you’re playing a professional’s game and they have more and better information, better analysis, better technology, better execution, and better everything.

Trading Isn’t Just Hard

Structural Costs Are Hidden but Real

Let’s say you decide to trade based on a hunch or opinion. 

Here’s what happens:

• You don’t trade at “market price.” You pay a spread (the cost of liquidity).
• Larger trades affect the market: you get market impact and slippage. Transaction costs increase in a nonlinear way the bigger you are because market depth becomes more of a concern.
• Some brokers (most famously, Robinhood) sell your order flow to professional traders (e.g., market makers or quant funds).

These professional strategies often:

• Use pattern recognition algorithms to detect “uninformed” retail order flow.
• Trade against you systematically.
• Have statistical edges rooted in decades of research, real-time data feeds, speed, etc.
  

Even the illusion of a “free” trade is a trap.

The house always wins – not by cheating, but because it’s built that way.

Institutions Aren’t Guessing—They’re Scaling Probability

Trying to trade against institutional investors is like playing pick-up basketball against NBA professionals in disguise. 

The more you try to predict and react, the more likely you are to underperform just staying in the index. 

Just like there’s some chance you might be able to make a lucky shot, but the longer it goes on, the worse it’s likely to be.

The Long-Term Math Is What Matters

Here’s the magic of compounding over the past 40 years with a simple plan:

• $1,000/month invested, inflation-adjusted (i.e., if inflation is 2% the next year, then $1,020/mo the next year)

In US equities, that’s $10.4 million as of the time of the original writing of this article.

That’s not from timing, prediction, or brilliance. It’s from habitual investing and time. 

This translates into:

• ~$600,000/year pre-tax income from that portfolio using an estimated earnings yield of 5.75% (i.e., what’s organically produced)
• Total trading decisions: Zero, aside from periodic rebalancing if necessary
• Stress required: Zero, if you don’t look often. Everything looks bigger up close than it does in retrospect.

Now, maybe over the next 40 years the results aren’t anywhere as good. That’s plausible.

Let’s say it’s only half as good since the past 40 years have been abnormally good for US equities.

So, that’s still $5.2 million or around $300,000/year in pre-tax income.

Ownership vs. Trading

When you own stocks, you’re owning businesses. Businesses earn profits and grow. That’s what you’re buying, not a fluctuating ticker on your screen.

The daily price action is just how other people transact. It doesn’t change your ownership in any meaningful way. 

Looking at it too often doesn’t make you more informed; it just makes you more anxious.

Let’s say instead of stocks it’s farmland (which is usually not marked-to-market, though it can be securitized and traded daily like anything else). 

If the price of it falls, the land is still there; the crops are still growing. 

The price may have fallen, but the value probably hasn’t changed.

Professional Investing Is Like a Sport

The Game Is Too Fast

Just like watching elite athletes makes a sport look deceptively easy, so too with markets.

It looks easy, but it’s not. These are professionals working full-time with:

• Quantitative models that can crunch far more data faster, better, and less emotionally than any human could ever possibly do
• Macro research
• Risk management systems
• Execution algos

It’s not easy to compete.

There’s No Shame in Indexing

Indexing is not a lack of strategy. It’s a conscious decision to refuse to be prey. 

You’re owning the market, participating in growth, and compounding your wealth with minimal leakage from fees, transaction costs, emotion, or error.

You have three main things going for you:

• Your savings rate (the #1 thing)
• Each share becoming intrinsically more valuable over time (people become more productive over time)
• Dividends and distributions reinvested back in

If you want to experiment with active trading, treat it like a small, capped entertainment budget. 

Nothing wrong with learning or having fun – we all have to start somewhere if you do want to do it professionally.

Maybe eventually you get to the other side and have a genuine, repeatable edge.

Just don’t confuse fun with serious wealth-building.

When to Trade: Life-Driven, Not Emotion-Driven

There are only a few good reasons to trade:

• Major life events 
• Portfolio rebalancing
• Liquidity needs: big purchases, tax obligations, etc.
• A change in your financial goals or time horizon

Outside of these, most trades are emotionally driven. And therefore suboptimal.

Conclusion: Build the Habit, Ignore the Noise

You don’t need to be smart enough to outguess the market. You just need to be wise enough not to try. 

Most should be passengers, not pilots.

Financial success isn’t about cleverness – it’s about behavior. 

It’s about sticking to your process, letting compounding do the work, and focusing on the life you’re building, not the line on the chart.

Look at prices once a year if you want to feel “in control.” 

But know this: every time you check, you increase the odds of doing something you’ll regret.

So the invitation is simple:

• Set your plan.
• Fund it habitually.
• Ignore everything else.

That’s the winning formula.

Everything else is noise – or worse, bait.