LogFAQs > #968005745

You can check it as much as you want but by nature the short-term fluctuations are completely pointless to worry about or obsess over unless you're approaching retirement age. If you're 30 years old and the principle of your investment is down then you have 30 years for it to go back up. In fact, in theory you should prefer it being down earlier in your career so that you buy in at lower prices.

With that being said, I've heard horror stories of people who have no idea what they're invested in and never looked at their 401k for years or decades and discover it was sitting in a money market account the whole time, missing decades of compounding growth. So you should at least check it enough that you don't do something like that.