Financial statements, online access, the news and so much more draw our attention to our investment accounts on a constant basis.

The barrage of information can very quickly overwhelm you, and at times can be too much data for the average person to process. If you have ever found yourself flip-flopping on an investment decision due to confounding information, you already know just how stressful this can be.

In the not-too-distant past, if you wanted to know the price of a stock, you could have looked it up in the newspaper where yesterday’s closing price was reported. If you wanted an up-to-the-minute price, you would have had to call your stockbroker and ask them to look it up for you on their computer. These days, it’s a point of personal preference if you think today’s abundance of information or yesteryear’s relative “lack” of information is better.

Your gut reaction might be that having more information is always better. With more data comes better decisions, right? Unfortunately, this is not always true. Recent research from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey shows that more information might cause us to make worse decisions. When we bring our previous knowledge and experience to a situation and then add new information, this can confuse our decision making, causing us to be less confident and, as a result, less likely to pick the best option.

If you find the near constant data stream of investment information to be overwhelming or annoying, you might be better served offloading the work that goes into investing to an advisory team like us. Our job as wealth and investment advisors is to distill all the information available on markets and investments, and apply it to a consistent plan specifically designed to benefit you with the best possible outcomes. Of course, no one can see into the future. What happens tomorrow or next year might be unexpected, which is why we always plan for the long term. In our experience, investment and retirement planning require a lot of small decisions over a long time that add up to one long-term goal.

An overabundance of information can seem to imply that a new decision should be constantly made, but in our experience, this is typically not the case. Often, when presented with something new, our reaction should be to do nothing. When making long-term-oriented decisions, new information should be considered appropriately, but we need to be careful to not give any new piece of data too much weight; doing so would distract us from our long-term focus.

Distilling the good information from the bad and putting the good information into use can be incredibly arduous and difficult.