Checking your investments too often can be a good way to end up out of pocket.
This wisdom, gained from behavioural finance experiments showing that too much information leads to “myopic loss aversion”, could lead investors to believe they should just “set it and forget it”. However, experts insist you should know what you own, and even if you want to retain the same exposure, you should check to see if there is now a cheaper way of doing so.
In the fast-evolving investment fund industry, this can often be the case. First, exchange traded funds usually offer much lower fees than their mutual fund counterparts, and this partly explains why they continue to grab market share. But even within the ETF market, price competition has been fierce, so it is worth checking whether a lower-fee version of the ETF you already own has been launched.