a b s t r a c t Karlsson, Loewenstein and Seppi (2009) found that, following market downswings, investors are less likely to login to monitor their retirement portfolios. They concluded that, rather like (apocryphal) ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, investors avoid unpleasant information by reducing portfolio monitoring in response to news of negative market movement. We apply generalised non-linear mixed effects models to test for this selective information monitoring at an individual level in a new sample of active online investors. We see different behaviour in this new sample. We find that investors increase their portfolio monitoring following both positive and daily negative market returns, behaving more like hyper-vigilant meerkats than head-in-the-sand ostriches. This pattern persists for logins not resulting in trades and weekend logins when markets are closed. Moreover, an investor personality trait -neuroticism -moderates the pattern of portfolio monitoring suggesting that market -driven variation in portfolio monitoring is attributable to psychological factors.

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We study investor happiness in a panel survey of brokerage clients at a UK bank. When investors anticipate future happiness, they set their return aspirations according to personal portfolio risk, objectives, investment horizon, confidence, and other individual characteristics. They are accurate in their forecasts, only rarely are investors unhappy with outcomes they predicted they would be happy with, and vice versa. However, determinants of experienced happiness only partially correspond to the ones found for anticipated happiness. In particular, relative performance plays an important role investors do not anticipate. Having outperformed other people contributes to investor happiness, as does active trading success.JEL-Classification Codes: D14, G02, G11