Gyroscopic Investing

Despite the discipline of the PP method, I  find myself compulsively checking  kitco for the price of gold/silver upon waking, at work on my cell phone (along with the other PP funds on an app), count me in the 5-10/day category ( thankfully my purchases are mechanical/automated and totally based on PP rebalancing wisdom now).

Background: I'm a reformed silver bug (once had 30% of my portfolio in gold mining stocks and silver, dabbled in Palladium, junior miners etc.), got out with my shirt and some recoverable losses thankfully. Did some day trading with the ETFs and was pulling in a few hundred a day in the silver boom, that idea stopped suddenly when silver crashed below $40 and ended up in the red overall... Ahhh the 2010-2011 run up, those were the days man, we LIVED!

Thank you Harry Browne for saving me from myself (I think...) 

Mike59 wrote: Despite the discipline of the PP method, I  find myself compulsively checking  kitco for the price of gold/silver upon waking<snip>

I have a general purpose financial spreadsheet (google docs) that I check and update every morning with my coffee.  It pulls in the price of gold as one of it's tabs.

It is just part of the whole spreadsheet.  My Permanent Portfolio positions.  How much I spent on coffee and steak this month.  Do I need to buy toilet paper?

You shouldn't have an issue about checking gold every day.  As long as you don't sweat the price of hamburger every day.  (Shout out to MG.  Damn! Beef and eggs and cream are going through the roof...)

Hey Mike,

Do you check other stuff compulsively (stock, bonds, sports results) or just gold prices? The place I look a lot is Ryan Melvey's Stable Investing site because it shows all the PP assets and I find the daily movements interesting. I don't really worry about them much, but there you can see how often one asset zigs when another is zagging (to paraphrase Craig).

I also think that a lot of us are still trying to adjust to the fact that we can check stuff a lot. I've only had a smart phone for about four years and I suffer a bit from SPCS (Smart Phone Checking Syndrome). This time of year I look for weather updates here in The Northeast and I check other stuff. When I think it's getting unhealthy, I'll stick my devices in another room and ignore them.

I think you can look at this a couple of ways. Either you only check as often as you need to so that you can take action if need be (rebalance, contribute to a lagging asset, lax-loss harvest, etc.), or you can check asset prices a lot because you find this stuff interesting.

The other thing is that if you are all in stocks or all in gold, your net worth can go up or drop dramatically in a day or two. The PP is designed to crawl slowly up over time. Overall we are probably best off focussing on living healthy lives so that we can be in our nineties and still watching the crawl.

One way to combat over-checking is to use a task manager with repeats like RememberTheMilk.com and then program in when you are supposed to check, and have the checking repeating into the future... schedule looking at portfolio 366 days into the future, look every late December for tax losses to harvest, everything. Then forget about it.

I used to check multiple times a day, but now I just check the entire portfolio in yahoo finance once a day (if that)