The fastest way to lose money in public markets is to feel like you have to do something. Not to be wrong — being wrong is survivable. The problem is urgency. Urgency is what turns a reasonable idea into a rushed position, and a rushed position into a permanent loss.
Most of the pressure to act doesn’t come from the business you’re buying. It comes from the noise around it — a headline, a number that moved, someone on a screen telling you the window is closing. And in the middle of that, the question nobody asks is the most important one: what actually changes if I wait another month?
Usually, nothing. That’s the core of how I think about Garrett O’Rourke investing principles in my own portfolio: good opportunities don’t require immediate action. Bad ones almost always do.
What Selling Taught Me About Waiting
My professional background is in sales, business development and call-center operations — running teams, building repeatable processes, and living with the numbers those processes produce. That might sound like a strange foundation for a discussion about public markets, but it’s the most useful one I have.
In a call center, you learn very quickly that pressure is a tactic. When someone tells a customer the offer disappears at midnight, that’s not information about the product. It’s a device designed to short-circuit deliberation. It works because people hate the feeling of missing out more than they fear making a mistake.
Over the years, I’ve watched that exact same mechanism operate in investing — except the person applying the pressure is often the investor himself. Nobody called and said the window was closing. He decided it was. The market went up for three weeks and he manufactured his own deadline.
One thing I’ve learned from running sales organizations: the best salespeople aren’t the fastest talkers. They’re the ones who ask better questions and are comfortable with silence. They’re willing to walk away from a deal that doesn’t fit. That’s not passivity. That’s discipline with a clear standard behind it — and it’s the same muscle that serves you as an investor.
Why Impatience Is So Expensive
Here’s the structural reason patience matters: in public markets, you have a nearly unlimited number of opportunities and no obligation to take any of them. There is no quota. Nobody is grading your activity. You can pass on a thousand businesses and it costs you nothing.
That’s an extraordinary advantage, and most people throw it away. They treat the market like a job that requires daily output. Running a business teaches you the difference between activity and progress — a team can be busy all day and move nothing forward. The same is true in a portfolio. Turnover is not the same as thinking.
There’s also a math problem underneath the psychology. Every time you act quickly, you’re implicitly claiming you know something the person on the other side of the trade doesn’t. Sometimes that’s true. But acting fast is precisely when you’re least likely to have done the work that would justify the claim. You’re buying a price, not a business — which is the line that separates investment from speculation.
Numbers matter here, and they take time to understand. A business’s earnings across a full cycle, how it behaved in a bad year, whether margins are structural or temporary, how much debt sits underneath the story — none of that is visible in a chart on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s visible in years of filings. Reading them is slow. That slowness is the point.
Separating the Price From the Business
The single most useful mental shift I’ve made as an investor is treating a stock as partial ownership of an operating business rather than a ticker with a moving number attached.
When you own a real business — when you’re responsible for a team, a payroll, a customer base — you don’t ask what it’s worth every fifteen minutes. You ask whether customers are coming back, whether your cost to acquire them is sustainable, whether the people running the place are honest and capable. Those questions resolve over quarters and years, not minutes.
A quoted price is just an offer from someone else. Some days that offer is generous. Some days it’s insulting. Neither tells you much about the underlying business. Patience is what lets you hold that distinction in your head instead of letting the quote define reality for you.
This is also where risk enters the picture, and I think about risk before I think about return. Not volatility — I don’t consider a price moving around to be risk in any meaningful sense. Risk is permanent impairment: paying a price that no realistic version of the future justifies, or owning a balance sheet that can’t survive a bad stretch. Waiting reduces both. Time gives you more information and often a better entry point.
Practical Ways to Build Patience Into a Process
Patience isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a set of habits you install so that your worst instincts have less room to operate. A few that have worked for me:
- Write down your reasoning before you buy. Not a paragraph of enthusiasm — the specific conditions that make the investment work and what would prove you wrong. If you can’t articulate it clearly, you don’t understand it yet. That alone kills a lot of impulsive positions.
- Impose a delay on new ideas. When something looks compelling, give it a set waiting period before acting. Genuinely good businesses are still good a few weeks later. What the delay filters out is excitement disguised as analysis.
- Keep cash without apologizing for it. Holding cash feels like failure because it looks like inaction. It isn’t. It’s optionality. The investor with dry powder in a dislocated market has choices the fully invested one doesn’t.
- Decide in advance what you’d pay. Set a price you’d be comfortable with and then wait. If it never gets there, you’ve lost nothing but an opportunity you never had a right to.
- Track your decisions, not just your positions. Review the ideas you passed on as well as the ones you took. Over time you’ll find that a meaningful share of your best decisions were the ones where you did nothing at all.
- Separate news from information. Most of what gets published on a given day has zero bearing on the ten-year earning power of a business. Learn to tell the difference and your attention gets a lot cheaper to maintain.
Conviction Has to Be Yours
There’s one more reason patience matters, and it’s the one people underestimate. If you buy something because somebody else was confident about it, you have no foundation to stand on when the price falls. Borrowed conviction evaporates under pressure. You’ll sell at the worst possible moment, and you’ll never know whether the thesis was wrong or you just flinched.
Doing your own work is slow. It’s supposed to be. But the work is what lets you sit through a bad quarter without panicking, because you understand what you own and why. That’s independence, and it’s not something you can outsource.
In my experience, across both operating businesses and investing, the compounding advantages almost always go to the people who are willing to be boring for long stretches. Consistency beats intensity. The operator who runs the same process every week outperforms the one who reinvents everything each quarter. The investor who makes a handful of well-considered decisions over a decade generally does better than the one making a handful every month.
You don’t get paid for effort in public markets. You get paid for being right and being patient enough to let that play out. Those are different skills, and the second one is rarer.
This reflects my personal perspective as a private investor and business operator based in Miami Beach. It isn’t individualized financial advice — everyone’s circumstances, timeline and risk tolerance are different, and you should do your own work or consult an appropriate professional before making investment decisions.
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash