Invest With Patience
Some of your best investments will spend long periods doing very little before making their biggest moves.
What This Means
One of the biggest mistakes investors make is expecting their investments to produce steady returns every day, every week, or even every month. That’s simply not how investing works.
Even great investments go through periods where they appear to do nothing. They may decline, underperform the market, or move sideways for months at a time. That doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong.
We believe investments should be evaluated over meaningful periods of time—not based on what happened this week or after a single headline.
Patience is one of the most valuable traits an investor can have. Many investments spend long stretches going nowhere before producing a large portion of their returns in a relatively short period of time. Selling because you become impatient may cause you to miss exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Common Questions
How do I know if I should be patient or sell?
Ask yourself one question: Do the reasons I bought it still exist? If they do, be patient. But don’t ignore the trend. A persistent downtrend can tell you your thesis is wrong or the market disagrees. We use weekly charts to help separate normal volatility from a meaningful change.
What time frame should I use to judge my investments?
Don’t judge an investment by what it did this week. Zoom out. We typically evaluate investments over three months, six months, or even a year while keeping an eye on the longer-term trend. The shorter the time frame, the more noise you’ll see.
Remember This:
Great investments take time.