Patience is a position, not a mood
2026-08-11 — Holding is easy to describe and hard to make routine. The difference is whether it is written down as a rule or felt as a preference.
Every long-horizon investor says the same thing about time, and almost none of them write down what it obliges them to do on the day it stops being comfortable. A mood is not a policy. A policy says in advance what happens when the case for an asset is unchanged and its price is not.
So we write the rule before we need it. It has three parts: what would have to become true for the position to be wrong, what we are allowed to do while we wait, and who is permitted to change the first part. The third is the one that matters. If the answer is whoever is in the room at the time, the rule was decoration.
None of this makes waiting pleasant. It makes it legible, which is the only thing that has ever kept it from being renegotiated at the worst moment.