Challenging Investment Rules and Key Investor Traits

Today, we’re diving into two thought-provoking questions:

1. What’s a famous investment rule I don’t agree with?
2. Which key characteristics should a good investor have?

A Famous Investment Rule I Don’t Agree With: “Buy and Hold”

Buy and hold becomes a religion during bull markets. Then, holding a stock because you bought it is often rewarded through higher and higher valuations. There’s a Pavlovian bull market reinforcement – every time you don’t sell (hold) a stock, it goes higher.

Buying is a decision. So is holding, but it should not be a religion but a decision. The value of any company is the present value of its cash flows. When the present value of cash flows (per share) is less than the price of the stock, the stock should not be “held” but sold.

Buffett is looked upon as the deity of buy and hold.

Look at Coca Cola when it hit $40 in 1999. Its earnings power at the time was about $0.80. It was trading at 50 times earnings. It was significantly overvalued, considering that most of the growth for this company was in the past.

Fast-forward almost a quarter of a century – literally a generation. Today the stock is at $60. It took more than a decade to reclaim its 1999 high. Today, Coke’s earnings power is around $1.50–1.90. Earnings have stagnated for over a decade. If you did not sell the stock in 1999, you collected some dividends, not a lot but some. The stock is still trading at 30–40x earnings. Unless they discover that Coke cures diabetes (not causes it), its earnings will not move much. It’s a mature business with significant health headwinds against it.

“Long-term” and “buy-and-hold” investing are often confused.

People should not own stocks unless they have a long-term time horizon. Long-term investing is an attitude, an analytical approach. When you build a discounted cash flow model, you are looking decades ahead. However, this doesn’t mean that you should stop analyzing the company’s valuation and fundamentals after you buy the stock, as they may change and affect your expected return. After you put in a lot of analytical work and buy the stock, you should not simply switch off your brain and become a mindless buy-and-hold investor.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be patient, which I’ll discuss next; but holding, not selling, a stock is a decision.

Key Characteristics of a Good Investor

I’m going to sound a bit more preachy than usual, but it’s very difficult to answer this question in any other way.

You need three Ps – passion, patience, process.

Passion

Investing is not a 9-to-5 job; it’s a 24/7 adventure. Unlike flipping burgers or processing insurance claims, where you can clock in at 9 AM, fall into a stupor, and then reawaken at 5 PM when you clock out.

This should be your test: If you catch yourself treating investing as a 9-to-5 job, then you have little passion for it.

If this is the case, don’t do it (this probably applies to any choice of a profession). You don’t stand a chance against people for whom investing is a never-ending puzzle to be solved on their life’s journey. All of my investment friends are dripping with passion for investing; they are obsessed with it. None of them are in it only for the money.

You won’t last long in this profession if you’re not passionate about stocks.

Patience

Investing is like real life – the connection between effort and result is nonlinear. It is very loose.

You may be making all of the right rational decisions: You are buying stocks that lie within your EQ/IQ spectrum, and they are significantly undervalued, but the market simply doesn’t care. It just keeps sending your stocks down. To make things even more frustrating, while your stocks are declining, speculators who treat the stock market as a craps table at Caesars Palace are killing it, making money hand over fist. It’s painful. It is excruciatingly painful if you have the wrong client base.

This is where patience comes in. My father told me this story, which happened right before I was born.

My family lived in Murmansk, a city 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle in northwest Russia. My mom went to give birth to my brothers and me in Saratov, a city in central Russia, about 1200 miles from Murmansk. She wanted to be closer to her parents. My father could not leave work, so he stayed in Murmansk.

A few weeks before I was born, he went to visit his best friend, Alexander. He told him that he was worried about my mom and the birth. His friend told him something that I remember to this day (with a chuckle): “Naum, you did your part; you cannot go back and correct what you did. Now you just have to wait.”

Investing is patience punctuated by decisions.

As the French mathematician Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

One more thought here: I try to take the temperature of my emotions and the mental activity of my brain. When I find myself overheating, with the stock market occupying my entire brain, I forcibly disconnect and unplug myself from it. The quality of my thoughts and decisions when my brain is overheating is likely to be low. So, I go for a walk in the park, read a fiction book, go see a movie, or visit an art museum.

Process

Managing someone else’s money is an incredible responsibility, which you may not fully appreciate during bull markets. But sideways and bear markets will remind you quickly.

I don’t want to over-glorify what we do – we are not curing cancer or saving people from burning buildings. But IMA clients entrust us with their life savings and tell me, “Vitaliy, please don’t screw it up.”

My decisions may determine whether our clients get to retire, pay for their medical expenses, or help their kids buy houses.

Staying rational when the world around you is melting up with greed or melting down in fear isn’t a capacity that one accidentally stumbles upon. You engineer it through a series of small, repeatable decisions – your investment process.

Key takeaways

• The famous “Buy and Hold” investment rule isn’t always sound – holding should be a decision, not a religion. Even Warren Buffett, the deity of buy-and-hold, has examples like Coca-Cola where blindly following this rule led to subpar returns.
• Long-term investing is an attitude and analytical approach, not mindless holding. Investors should continuously analyze a company’s valuation and fundamentals, as they may change and affect expected returns.
• Good investors possess three crucial Ps: Passion, Patience, and Process. Investing should be a 24/7 adventure, not just a 9-to-5 job.
• Patience is critical in investing, as the connection between effort and result is often nonlinear. As Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
• A solid investment process is essential, especially when managing others’ money. It helps maintain rationality in the face of market euphoria or panic, and it’s engineered through a series of small, repeatable decisions.