How much attention does a position actually need?

Why this matters. Attention is the input nobody budgets, and it is the one that runs out first.

A position needs enough attention to notice its invalidation condition. Almost everything above that is consumption rather than monitoring.

The finding you already have

Replicated: how often results are evaluated changes how much risk people take — Benartzi and Thaler (1995), tested directly by Thaler, Tversky, Kahneman and Schwartz (1997), and again by Gneezy and Potters (1997). Course 1 covered it as why checking more often makes the same portfolio feel riskier.

Over a long horizon it compounds into something else: attention spent has a ceiling, and what is spent on watching is not available for deciding.

The question that sets the budget

Not "how often should I look?" but "what would I do differently if I looked more often?" For most positions, honestly answered, the answer is nothing — the invalidation condition is not a tick-by-tick object.

Where the answer is genuinely something, that is a different position, and it needs the attention. The point is that the two get treated identically by default.

What this is not

Not a recommendation to disengage, and not a claim that less watching produces better returns. No such evidence exists and this domain does not make performance claims. It is a claim about a finite input and where it goes.

The artefact

An attention budget: for each position, the checking interval it warrants and the reason, written when the position is opened.

Then a check outside the interval is visible as a departure rather than as normal behaviour, and Course 2's decision-frequency count gives you the measurement to compare it against.

What the departures tell you

After a month, count the checks that fell outside the interval and look at when they happened. They cluster. Usually after a loss, sometimes after news that turned out to be about something else, occasionally at the same hour each day. The cluster is a fact about you and not about the position, and it is the kind of fact Course 3's base-rate sheet is built from.

Try it now

For one position, write the interval and the reason. Then answer honestly what you would do differently by looking twice as often.