1. According to "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets," there are two reasons that it might be preferable to monitor the return on an investment rather infrequently. The first is that less frequent checking produces more pleasurable than unpleasurable time in the investor's life. For example, if he checks once every minute, he will have 241 pleasurable versus 239 unpleasurable minutes per day, which totals 60,688 pleasurable versus 60,271 unpleasurable minutes per year-a roughly 50/50 proportion-whereas if he checks once per year, he will only have one bad year versus 19 good years (Taleb). The second is that enjoying a pleasurable experience does not offset the negative emotional and physical effects of the unpleasurable one (Taleb). Given these two reasons, the investor is far better off only checking his investment infrequently. If he checks it frequently and the news is only good once in awhile, as generally happens with investments, the many times he checks and finds the news bad, he will be incurring not only that many unpleasurable minutes but the many deleterious effects of displeasure, such as fear, worry, sickness, despair, depression, and myriad other negative effects. If he checks it infrequently, he has greatly minimized his exposure to all of those deleterious effects.
2. The concept behind the survivorship bias is that it is only the winner who is remembered in any scenario (Taleb). There may have been other individuals who tried to develop a telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell is the one we all remember, because he is the one who succeeded. Likewise, sports buffs who collect trading cards and remember runs batted in and other statistics remember the athletes that won the games; they rarely remember who lost unless the individual lost in a spectacular way. Thus, since many more people lose than win, winning is what makes the winners stand out and become memor<...