Count how often you checked today
Friday, 3:40 PM, a bank branch lobby on Lexington Avenue near East 86th Street.
Four chairs, one easel advertising a savings rate, and a line that was not moving. The woman in the second chair was about sixty-six. She wore a camel coat, had reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, and held a phone in her right hand.
She studied the screen for a long moment. Then she laid it face-down on her thigh and pressed her palm flat over it, the way you hold a lid on a pot that wants to boil over.
Forty seconds later she lifted it and looked again. The palm went back down.
At the counter she asked one question: if rates are up, why is my bond fund down?
I have asked worse questions in banks, usually about the pen chained to the counter.
It wasn't the question. It was the palm.
SEEING THROUGH
The Pressed Palm
EVIDENCE: MIXED ■■□ · Rates official; checking effect replicates unevenly
The palm came down at the end of a hard week for bonds. The Fed's daily rate table put the 10-year Treasury yield at 5.18% at Thursday's close, September 24, up from 5.01% the Friday before; the 30-year reached 5.47%. On Wednesday the 10-year hit its highest level in 19 years, pushed by strong factory data and bets on another rate increase. The Fed had already raised its key rate a quarter point on September 16, to 3.75–4%. Her question has a plain answer. When new bonds pay more, older bonds sell for less, and a bond fund is a basket of older bonds. The complication was on the easel by the door. The same rise means new money now earns more. Same week, same lobby, opposite news.
Underneath
How the news reaches the nervous system
The oldest test of the checking habit is small. In 1997, Gneezy and Potters gave 83 Dutch students a lottery that paid off on average. Students who saw results after every round bet about 51% of their stake. Those who saw results every three rounds bet about 67%, and earned more. A 2021 study of 341 Dhaka stock traders found the same direction: about 11 units more invested out of 100 with less feedback. It has not been peer reviewed. The body enters in a 2009 New York University experiment. In 29 students, the skin's sweat response, a stress signal, rose more per dollar lost than per dollar won. Picturing each choice as part of a portfolio shrank both. The limit is real. With real funds held for a year, the frequency effect vanished.
Scenarios, not forecasts
Not investment advice. I hold no positions in anything named here.
Tonight, count how many times you opened a balance, a fund page or a market app today. Don't judge the number. Then recall where your hand went the last time the figure was worse than you hoped. Did it grip, press, flip, or put the phone away? Write down the count and the hand. That pair is your baseline for the week.
Field Prescription
One action. Then take it to a professional.
Before acting on this week, ask your advisor:
1. What is the average duration of my bond holdings, and what would a one-point rate rise mean in dollars?
2. Which of my bonds or funds do I actually plan to hold until they mature?
3. How often should I be checking, given when I will need this money?
File status: open
What I don't know is whether she sold anything. She may simply have gone home and left the phone in her bag. The next number that moves rates is the September jobs report, due Friday at 8:30 AM ET. It could push yields either way; that is a scenario, not a forecast. Tomorrow the file goes back to the body, and to what an afternoon yawn is billing.
