Monday, August 25th, 2025
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There is a temptation in markets, as in most fields, to confuse cleverness with success. The investor who claims to divine the direction of the S&P 500, or who sees a bubble in semiconductor stocks before the rest of us, cuts a dashing figure. They are the sprinter streaking ahead in the opening metres of the race. But investing, unlike the 100m sprint, is a marathon, and what counts more than raw speed is the dogged capacity to keep going when glamour has long since given way to grind.
The unglamorous truth is that patience and persistence matter more than genius.
It is less a contest of IQ than of temperament. If that sounds banal, it is because investors don’t much like to be told that their fortune depends not on some esoteric algorithm but on their willingness to do nothing for long stretches of time.
Think of Warren Buffett, whose very name has become a synonym for investing brilliance. The myth has it that he has a preternatural gift for sniffing out bargains. The reality is subtler. His favourite holding period, as he says, is ‘forever.’ Much of Berkshire Hathaway’s vast wealth comes not from a dazzling trick but from the compounding of returns across decades. Buffett’s genius lies in the ability to be a boring investor, to let Coca-Cola shares or American Express plod along without trading them, or buying the next new exciting investment.
Contrast that with the day-trader who seeks to buy low on Monday and sell high on Tuesday. Even if they succeed once, the odds of repeating the feat consistently are vanishing. Timing the market requires clairvoyance. And clairvoyance, like perpetual motion, is an idea more at home in science fiction than in life.
A helpful analogy comes from sport. The most decorated tennis player is not the one who hits the fastest serve or the most flamboyant winner. It is the one who keeps the ball in play, who avoids the needless error, who accepts that grand slam titles are ground out over long summers. In investing, as in tennis, restraint is underrated.
There is another dimension to persistence beyond mere waiting. It is the willingness to keep saving and investing through good times and bad. The bear market is the investor’s exam room. Those who capitulate and sell out discover that they have failed not because they lacked sophistication but because they lacked staying power. Recall 2008. Many who sold at the trough locked in losses and missed the subsequent rally. Those who held on, or better, who added to their positions, were rewarded in the years after.
The same pattern recurs in every downturn. March 2020, when the pandemic closed borders and emptied cities, offered yet another test. To buy then felt reckless. To sit tight felt equally so. But the world did not end, and the market rebounded with astonishing speed. The lesson was not that you should be a daredevil contrarian, but that you should have the stamina to keep going when others cannot.
Patience also guards against one’s worst enemy: oneself. Humans are prone to action. We want to tweak, to adjust, to intervene. A gardener waters, prunes, and fertilises, but the deeper magic of growth is photosynthesis, which takes place on its own. The wise gardener knows when to step back. The wise investor does too.
In markets, there will always be investors who are smarter, there will always be luckier people than you too. But if you are more persistent than most, if you are content to let compounding do the heavy lifting, then you will be richer than many of them.
We would like to thank Dominion Capital Strategies for writing this content and sharing it with us.
Sources: Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch, MSCI.
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