Haste Is Your Worst Enemy: Why Urgency in Finance Is Rarely Yours
By Diego Alcalá Whenever an investment comes with the label "decide today or you lose it forever," you should set off an alarm. Not because the opportunity is n
By Diego Alcalá · Mon Aug 24 2026 · investing
By Diego Alcalá
Whenever an investment comes with the label "decide today or you lose it forever," you should set off an alarm. Not because the opportunity is necessarily bad, but because of a more basic question: who benefits from you deciding quickly? Almost never you. Urgency, in finance, is rarely yours. It belongs to whoever is selling you something.
Real opportunities — the ones built on solid fundamentals — almost never require you to decide in five minutes. A good business is still a good business next week. If something only works when you buy it before thinking about it, it is not an opportunity. It is a trap with a stopwatch.
I have written before that the market is like a train: if you miss one, another one always comes. Today I want to go a step further and talk not about patience as a virtue, but about haste as a system of errors — and about how to design your own defence against it.
Speed Is Not the Same as Haste
Two things are worth separating. Speed is executing with agility a decision you already made well. Haste is making the decision itself under pressure, without the analysis it deserved. One is a virtue; the other is a mistake waiting to happen.
Festina lente, the Romans said — "make haste slowly." The idea is a beautiful one: you can move quickly in execution precisely because you took the time to think slowly beforehand. Daniel Kahneman explained it in modern terms with his two systems of thinking. One fast, intuitive and emotional; the other slow, deliberate and analytical. The problem is that important financial decisions activate the fast system — the one built from fear and euphoria — exactly when we would need the slow one. Haste hijacks your best brain and leaves you deciding with the worst one.
Decide the Rules in Calm, Not in the Storm
The moment to decide how you are going to invest is not when the opportunity shows up. It is much earlier. If you wait until the opportunity is in front of you to define your criteria, you have already lost, because you will define them contaminated by the excitement of that specific opportunity.
Atul Gawande wrote an entire book about something apparently trivial that saves lives in operating rooms: the checklist. His thesis is that in high-pressure situations even experts forget obvious steps, and a simple list made in advance prevents catastrophes. The same applies to investing. Putting your criteria in writing — what you are looking for, what price you would pay, which risks you are not willing to tolerate, how much of the portfolio you would commit at most — turns an emotional decision into an orderly verification. When the opportunity arrives, you do not improvise. You compare it against a list your rational self left ready for your emotional self.
Build Deliberate Friction
Knowing all this is not enough, because in the moment of temptation knowledge evaporates. That is why I do not rely on willpower alone; I prefer to design the system so that haste becomes physically difficult. In the Odyssey, Ulysses knew the song of the sirens would drive him mad, so he tied himself to the mast before hearing it. He did not trust himself to resist temptation. He made sure he could not give in to it.
In practice, this means building deliberate friction. I have mentioned before the rule of imposing a reflection period before any impulsive decision; the point is to turn that into a non-negotiable standard, not a good intention. A mandatory pause of 24 or 72 hours between the impulse and the transaction. A rule of "I never invest the same day something is presented to me." The obligation to write down, before buying, why I am buying and under what conditions I would sell. Each of these pauses is a small mast you tie yourself to, so that euphoria or fear do not decide for you.
Friction, which almost everywhere else is a defect, is a virtue in financial decisions. It slows down exactly what should not be fast.
Why This Matters More When You Invest Across a Border
If you are investing from outside the United States — and this is the case for many Canadian and Mexican readers — the pressure to decide fast tends to arrive with an extra layer. A trip has a return date. A visit to a property, a business or a broker gets compressed into a few days. The person showing you the opportunity knows when your flight leaves.
That deadline is real, but it is a travel deadline, not an investment deadline. The two get confused easily, and the confusion works against you. A checklist written at home, in your own language and in calm, is worth more when you are reading it in another country with a suitcase already packed. So is the rule of never signing on the same trip in which you first saw something.
Haste disguises itself as opportunity, as boldness, as a "winning mentality." But most of the time it is only fear with good publicity — fear of being left out, fear of looking indecisive, fear that someone else wins what you did not. And decisions made from fear are rarely good, even when they sometimes get lucky. The serious investor is not the fastest to pull the trigger, but the one who designed a process so as not to have to trust their own pulse under pressure.
And you: how many of your worst financial decisions were made with time to spare — and how many were made in a hurry?
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This content is informational and educational. It does not constitute investment, legal, tax or immigration advice, nor a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Past returns do not guarantee future results. Consult a licensed professional before making decisions about your assets.
Image: "Ulysses and the Sirens," by Herbert James Draper (1909), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
This article was originally published in Spanish by Diego Alcalá at Comprando América: La prisa es tu peor enemiga.