Should I watch financial news like CNBC or Bloomberg for investing?

For most long-term, buy-and-hold investors, the answer is probably not — or at least, not daily. Financial news channels like CNBC and Bloomberg exist to keep you watching through an endless stream of market updates, expert predictions, breaking headlines, and flashing tickers. Their business model depends on engagement, not on helping you make better investment decisions. The research consistently shows that more frequent portfolio checking leads to worse returns through myopic loss aversion — the tendency to overreact to short-term losses when monitoring too frequently. Most long-term investors would likely be better off checking their portfolios quarterly, ignoring daily market noise entirely, and spending the freed-up time on literally anything else.

What happened to your portfolio when you stopped checking it daily?

The author of Buy Less Crap reports that stopping daily portfolio checks reduced his anxiety significantly and eliminated the urge to make impulsive trades based on news headlines. His actual returns likely improved — not because the underlying investments changed, but because he stopped interfering with them. Research from Fidelity found that their best-performing client accounts belonged to people who had either forgotten about their accounts or passed away. DALBAR research consistently shows the average investor underperforms the funds they own by several percentage points annually, purely through poor timing decisions triggered by reacting to news and market movements. Removing the trigger — daily news consumption and portfolio checking — removes the behavioural mistake at its source.

How often should I check my investment portfolio?

There is no single right answer, but the evidence points toward checking less often than most people do. Quarterly checks (four times per year) are sufficient for long-term investors to verify contributions are being made, rebalance if allocations have drifted more than 5% from target, and confirm no fraud or administrative errors have occurred. Some investors check only once or twice per year. The key principle is that checking frequency should match your investment horizon — if you're investing for 20+ years, daily movements are irrelevant noise. Markets go down on roughly 47% of all trading days but are up over the vast majority of 20-year rolling periods. More frequent checking simply exposes you to more negative days, which triggers loss aversion and poor decisions.

What should I do instead of watching financial news?

Replace the time spent on financial news with activities that either improve your earning power, deepen your understanding of investing fundamentals, or genuinely improve your life. Read a book on investing history or behavioural finance (which ages far better than market commentary). Learn a skill that increases your income. Go for a walk. Spend time with family. The irony is that almost anything you do with the time you used to spend watching market news will likely contribute more to your long-term wealth and wellbeing than the news itself would have. The author of Buy Less Crap reads quarterly fund reports, one or two investing books per year, and otherwise ignores financial media entirely. What he is not doing — reacting to daily headlines, trading on breaking news, and stressing about things he cannot control — is more important than what he is doing.

Does watching financial news actually hurt investment returns?

Yes — not directly, but through the behaviour it triggers. Financial news creates a sense of urgency and expertise that leads investors to trade more frequently, and the research is unambiguous that more trading leads to worse returns. A landmark study by Barber and Odean found that the most active traders underperformed the market by roughly 6.5% annually. CNBC, Bloomberg, and similar outlets are not malevolent — they are entertainment businesses that monetise your attention. Their format — urgent music, flashing graphics, countdown clocks, 'breaking news' banners, interviews with confident-sounding forecasters — is deliberately designed to make you feel like you need to act. But for a long-term investor with a diversified, low-cost portfolio, the correct action in response to almost all financial news is: nothing. Building systems that prevent you from seeing the news in the first place is more reliable than trying to resist the urge to act on it.

Why I Stopped Watching CNBC (And My Portfolio Thanked Me)

For roughly fifteen years, I started most mornings the same way: coffee in one hand, CNBC on the television, watching the pre-market futures tick up and down while a parade of well-dressed people told me with absolute certainty what the market was going to do next. It took me far too long to realise that this ritual was not making me a better investor. It was making me a more anxious one. And it was almost certainly costing me money.

When I finally stopped — deleted the apps, unsubscribed from the market news emails, stopped treating the S&P 500 closing level like a personal health metric — something unexpected happened. My returns didn't change much. But my stress levels dropped dramatically. And I stopped making the worst kind of investment mistakes: the ones driven by the urgent need to do something in response to a headline.

The business model of financial news (and why it's not on your side)

Let's be clear about what CNBC, Bloomberg, the FT's markets section, and every investing YouTube channel actually sell. They don't sell information — information is abundant and mostly free. They sell engagement. Eyeballs. Ad inventory. And the most reliable way to keep you engaged is to make you feel like something urgent is happening that you need to understand right now.

The financial media playbook

▸Urgent music. The dramatic orchestral buildup before every segment signals your brain: pay attention, something important is happening.
▸Flashing numbers. Green and red tickers scrolling constantly. Every movement looks significant when it's colour-coded and animated.
▸Confident forecasts. "Here's where the S&P 500 is heading next." The forecast is almost always wrong, but the confidence is what sells. Nobody tunes in for "markets might go up, or they might go down, nobody really knows."
▸Extreme language. Markets don't "decline" — they "plunge," "tumble," "rout," "bloodbath." A 2% down day, which happens several times a year on average, is presented as a crisis requiring immediate action.
▸Action bias. Every segment ends with an implicit or explicit call to action: buy this, sell that, rotate into this sector, hedge against that risk. The format cannot accommodate the correct answer for most investors most of the time: do nothing.

None of this is a conspiracy. It's just what happens when you need to fill 24 hours of programming about something that is genuinely interesting for about 20 minutes a day. The rest is filler, speculation, and the endless human need to impose narratives on random noise.

What the research actually says about watching financial news

There's a growing body of evidence that consuming financial news makes you a worse investor. Not better. Worse.

The evidence against financial news consumption

1Barber and Odean (2000): The landmark study on retail investor behaviour. Investors who traded the most underperformed the market by roughly 6.5% annually. The primary driver of excessive trading? Overconfidence fuelled by consuming financial information — investors who watched more news and checked prices more often believed they had an edge. They didn't.
2Fidelity's best-performing accounts: Fidelity famously analysed which of their client accounts had the highest returns. The answer: accounts belonging to people who had either forgotten they had an account or had passed away. The dead and the forgetful outperformed everyone else — because they never watched CNBC, never panicked during crashes, and never tinkered.
3DALBAR's Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behaviour: Every year, DALBAR publishes research showing that the average investor significantly underperforms the funds they actually own. Over 30 years, the average equity fund investor earned about 4% less per year than the S&P 500 — purely through bad timing decisions. The research consistently identifies emotional reactions to news and market movements as the core cause.
4Tetlock (2007) — expert predictions: Philip Tetlock's research on expert political and economic forecasts found that the average expert forecaster was only slightly more accurate than random chance — and the more confident and famous the expert, the worse their predictions tended to be. The people CNBC puts on air are selected for confidence and charisma, not accuracy. Yet we keep listening.

The pattern is consistent and overwhelming: more information → more confidence → more trading → worse returns. The financial news industrial complex is not a neutral information delivery system. It's a behavioural mistake factory, and I was a loyal customer for fifteen years.

The day I realised I had a problem

It was early 2020. The markets were in freefall — the fastest bear market in history. I was watching CNBC for hours a day. The ticker was a river of red. Every guest had a terrifying forecast. "This could be worse than 2008." "We haven't seen the bottom." "Cash is king right now."

And I sold. Not everything — but enough that I locked in losses I didn't need to take, on investments I should have held for decades. The market bottomed shortly after and then embarked on one of the strongest recoveries in history. By selling, I turned a temporary paper loss into a permanent real one. The damage wasn't done by the virus or the market — it was done by my television.

I wish I could tell you I learned my lesson immediately. I didn't. It took another couple of years of morning market-watching before I finally asked myself: what am I actually getting from this? I wasn't trading on the information — I was a buy-and-hold investor, or at least I wanted to be. I wasn't making better decisions. I was just feeling anxious, informed in a way that didn't inform anything useful, and constantly fighting the urge to do something in response to news that would be irrelevant within 48 hours.

What I did instead

Quitting wasn't a single decision — it was a series of small changes that accumulated:

The financial news detox

Deleted the market apps from my phone. Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Investing.com — gone. If I wanted to check a price, I'd have to go to my computer and log in deliberately. The friction alone reduced my checking frequency by about 90%.
Removed the CNBC app from my TV home screen. I didn't cancel the channel — I just made it harder to reach. The home screen used to autoplay it. Now I'd have to navigate through three menus to find it. I haven't done that once in over two years.
Unsubscribed from daily market emails. The "Morning Briefing," the "Closing Bell Roundup," the "5 Things to Know Before the Open" — all of them. The unsubscribe button is the most underrated investing tool available.
Set a portfolio check schedule: four times a year. End of March, June, September, December. I mark them on my calendar. Between those dates, I don't look. The money is in there, doing whatever markets do, and my checking won't change the outcome — it'll only change my behaviour.
Replaced the morning TV ritual with something better. Now I read for 20 minutes in the morning. Sometimes investing books. Sometimes history. Sometimes just the newspaper, which at least has the decency to report on things that happened rather than predicting things that might happen.

What changed (and what didn't)

My portfolio didn't suddenly start delivering 20% annual returns. The underlying investments — global index funds, mostly — performed roughly as they would have anyway. What changed was what I didn't do:

▸I didn't sell during the 2022 bear market. I didn't even know it was happening in real time — by the time I did my quarterly check, the worst was already over.
▸I didn't rotate into "hot" sectors based on CNBC segments. No ARK Innovation. No crypto miners. No SPACs. Just the same boring global index funds, month after month.
▸I didn't spend hours each week consuming financial media that left me feeling both anxious and overconfident — a uniquely destructive combination.
▸I didn't make a single panic trade in over two years. Before the detox, I'd made at least one emotional decision per year that I later regretted.

The absence of mistakes is invisible. You don't see the money you didn't lose by selling at the bottom. You don't see the fees you didn't pay on trades you didn't make. You don't see the compounding you didn't interrupt. But over decades, the gap between an investor who makes periodic emotional mistakes and one who simply sits still is enormous — and the research bears this out again and again.

The one thing I still pay attention to

I'm not suggesting total ignorance. There are a few things worth knowing, and they tend to arrive quarterly rather than every six minutes:

I read my fund's annual and semi-annual reports — mostly to confirm that the fees haven't changed, the tracking error is minimal, and the fund is still doing what it says on the tin. I glance at the broad market maybe once a quarter. I pay attention to tax changes that affect ISAs, SIPPs, and dividend allowances — because those actually impact my after-tax returns in a way that stock market news doesn't.

That's about it. Maybe an hour a quarter. The rest of the time, I assume the market is doing whatever the market does — mostly going up over long periods, occasionally falling sharply, always recovering eventually — and I get on with my life.

What I actually do

I check my portfolio on the last weekend of March, June, September, and December. I record the total value and compare it to the previous quarter. I check whether my asset allocation has drifted more than 5% from target. I make any necessary adjustments. Then I close the spreadsheet and don't look again for three months. I consume zero daily financial news. Zero. I read one or two investing books a year. The rest of my attention goes to my business, my family, and my life — all of which deliver returns that don't show up on a brokerage statement.

The bottom line

Financial news is not information — it's entertainment packaged as information, designed to make you feel like you need to act when the correct action is almost always to do nothing. The industry needs you to trade, react, and stay glued to the screen. Your portfolio needs exactly the opposite.

I'm not saying CNBC is evil or that market news serves no purpose. For professional traders with short time horizons, it may be genuinely useful. But for the vast majority of ordinary investors — people investing monthly into index funds for a retirement decades away — financial news is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, the primary cause of their underperformance.

Try this for one month: delete the apps, stop watching the channels, cancel the email briefings. Check your portfolio once — at the beginning of the experiment — and then not again for 30 days. See how you feel. See whether you made any investing decisions you regret. I suspect you'll discover, as I did, that the less you know about what the market did today, the better your long-term results — and the better your sleep.

For educational purposes only. This is my personal experience and opinion. It is not financial advice. All investing carries risk. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Your circumstances are unique — always do your own research and consider seeking professional advice.