I find fluctuations in investments has a smaller emotional impact
on myself than what in see in daily life, e.g food price changes
at the grocery store. The former drawfs the latter in magnitude.
Perhaps this due to that investing is abstract while shopping is
concrete.
I've also heard the term "compartmentalization" thrown around:
that is, some people pay equal attention to each financial category-
daily life, big expenses, big investments- even when each category
is of a different magnitude and only the largest really matters.

"joeu2004" <joeu2004[at]hotmail.com> wrote in message
- quote -


Well, too bad you weren't watching at the 4:00 pm close when the index was
postive - above $19.00 positive!

Elizabeth Richardson

What a fun ride today! I just happened to catch CNBC's "Closing Bell"
today. Never watched anything like that before; but I was bored, and
it seemed better than any of the daytime soaps.

Anyway, at the start, the pundits were breathing a sigh of relief that
the Dow had come back from a loss of 343 to "only" 167 off.

But during the 15-or-so minutes that I listened to pundits, the
commentator had his eyes glued to the ticker tape as the Dow sharply
dropped another 140 points -- back to a loss of 300-some points.

At that point, I turned off TV to run my errands. But saw the
handwriting on the wall: with 40 minutes of panic selling remaining,
I was sure the Dow was head even lower -- 400 or more.

Imagine my surprise when I returned long after the market closed and
learned that the Dow ended the day only about 16 points off. Looking
at bigcharts.com, I can see that was some wild ride!