Having share prices in your face 24/7 is like having a giant red sign on top of your house constantly flashing the price that everyone else (on average) thinks your house is worth.

Do you want grey hair?  Just go outside and watch the price on that sign as it ticks up and down by hundreds, if not thousands of pounds every day.

Like the future, the news and people’s opinions, that price would move around essentially at random and often to an alarming degree.

Share price gazing can be hazardous to your wealth

Imagine you’re a buy-to-let landlord and you’ve picked up a nice house for £500,000 cash.  The tenants pay £2,000 a month to give you a more or less 5% income.

The reason you chose to invest in property as opposed to the much easier bond route is because you expect both the income and the capital value to go up more or less with inflation while bond coupons are fixed, which sounds sensible enough.

You’d wake up one morning a year later and the sign is flashing:

£550,000!

Great, it’s up 10k in a year, just what you expected and then some.  Add in the rental income and you’ll be retired in no time.

But hang on, the man on the news says the US might lose its triple A rating; “oh no it’s the end of the world!!!” you cry.  Most people agree with you and the next morning the sign flashes ominously:

£350,000!

At this point your other half throws some toast at you for being such an idiot not seeing this coming.  You’ve just lost £200,000 in ONE DAY!  That completely wipes out the meagre rent income of £25k that you’ve had so far, almost by a factor of 10!

After you return from work sobbing about the extra years you’ll have to work to make up for that loss, you hear on the radio that the AAA rating is going to stay, and more than that the Euro zone has finally got its act together and has decided to become the United States of Germany.

Of course…

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