Patience
Successful long-term investors have one thing in common. Patience.
Good things take time. Close relationships. Building trust. Growing a family. Learning a craft.
The Green River you see in the photo took 300 million years to carve its way through the Canyonlands outside Moab, Utah. It’s breathtaking. Well worth the wait.
Between 1982 and 2022 the stock market grew 9,399.31%, according to my friend David Leo. That’s a breathtaking return of 11.72% annually.
If you’d invested $10,000 at the beginning of that period, you’d have $939,931 at the end of it.
To get that breathtaking return you’d have had to endure 10 negative years and six Bear markets over that 41-year period. To do that you’d need patience.
No one wants to hear about patience these days. Too old-school. Sounds like your parents talking to you.
People want a quick fix. Hook me up with a guru. Slip me through the velvet ropes of pain and suffering. Give me a pill, a product, or a hack that makes it better. All gain, no pain.
Sorry. No can do, although many promise that they can.
We’ve all seen those Wall of Worry graphics that show the market’s sharply upward rise over the years despite all Hell breaking lose in the headlines.
No amount of bad news can stop it. But it’s not a straight line. Far from it. It takes patience to ride through the bumps. But the rewards for those who do are breathtaking.
Investment success, like digging a 1,300-foot canyon through solid rock, takes patience.
Advisors, are you spending enough time educating and preparing your clients for the climb?