The Most Expensive Thing You Can Do as an Investor
When I was a young investor, I used to think watching the stock market news was a productive use of my time.
Every time I turned on CNBC, a different person had a different opinion about which direction the market was going. Jim Cramer would be screaming on Mad Money, telling you to buy this stock or sell that one. CEOs would come on with their own agendas, talking up their companies with the kind of polished confidence that made everything sound like a sure thing. Analysts would disagree with each other in real time. The ticker ran across the bottom of the screen all day like a heartbeat monitor that never stopped.
I genuinely believed that if I paid close enough attention, I would eventually figure out the pattern.
I never did.
What I was actually doing was loading my brain with noise disguised as information. Every opinion I absorbed made me a little more anxious, a little more convinced that I needed to do something, adjust something, react to something.
That is exactly what financial media is designed to make you feel. Action creates engagement. Uncertainty keeps you watching.
The longer you invest, the more you realize that almost all of it is completely disconnected from what actually builds wealth. Experience has a way of burning that anxiety out of you slowly. Once you stop trying to react to every move the market makes and just stay invested, everything gets a lot calmer.
You realize the experts on television are not managing your money. You are. And the best thing you can do for your money is leave it alone.
There is one thing you need to focus on. Just keep investing.
The Most Expensive Mistake I See
People say to me all the time: should I start investing now? The market seems really high. Or they tell me they are waiting for a pullback before they get started. They want to wait until things settle down. Until there is more clarity. Until the right moment.
Waiting is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make as an investor.
Markets spend the majority of their time at or near all-time highs. That is not a warning sign. That is just how markets work when the economy is growing. The market being at a record does not mean it is about to fall. It usually means companies are earning more money, the economy is expanding, and things are fundamentally working.
If you had only invested when the market felt obviously cheap and safe and calm, you would have spent most of your investing life on the sidelines watching other people’s money compound.
I have also heard the other version of this. People who say they are waiting for the market to drop before they buy in. They are watching, ready to pounce on the dip. The problem is that while they are waiting for the dip, the market keeps going up. Then it dips a little, but not enough to feel like a real opportunity. Then it goes back up again. They wait longer. The cycle repeats.
Meanwhile they have been out of the market for two years and missed a substantial portion of gains they will never get back.
What the Numbers Actually Show
If you had invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 2003 and left it alone for 20 years, you would have ended up with roughly $64,000. That includes the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID crash in 2020, and every other ugly stretch in between. You just left it alone and let it run.
Now here is where it gets painful. If you had tried to time the market during that same period and missed just the 10 best trading days, you would have ended up with about $29,000. Miss the 20 best days and you are closer to $17,000.
Miss the 30 best days and you are under $10,000. You started with $10,000 and ended with less than you started with, simply because you were not in the market on the right days.
The best days in the market almost always happen right around the worst days.
When the market is dropping hard and fear is everywhere, a massive recovery day can come out of nowhere. The investors who moved to cash to protect themselves are sitting on the sidelines watching it happen. They absorbed the full damage of the drop and missed the bounce entirely. They did everything wrong while trying to do something smart.
There is always a reason to wait. Recession fears. An election year. Geopolitical tension. Valuations that look stretched. The specific concern changes every single year, but there is always something that feels like a reason to hold off. Waiting for a moment that feels completely safe means waiting for something that never actually comes.
Just Keep Investing
Trying to predict whether the market is going up or down is a fool’s errand.
The people who think they can do it consistently are almost always wrong, and the ones who get it right once tend to confuse luck with skill and blow it the next time.
The investors who build real wealth over time are almost never the ones who made the cleverest calls. They are the ones who stayed in the game the longest. They invested when things felt great and when things felt terrible. They did not watch CNBC and panic. They had a plan and they followed it regardless of what was happening on the screen.
Write down your investment plan. Know what you own and why you own it. Decide how much of your income you are going to invest every month and automate it so the decision does not depend on how you feel when your paycheck hits.
Then stop watching the ticker.
The noise is designed to make you act. The wealth is built by people who refuse to.
Putting your money in the market and waiting is how you actually get wealthy. That has been true for a long time, and all the noise in the world has not changed it yet.
