Time and Patience: The Trait That Predicts an Investor's Returns
By Diego Alcalá The number one cause of wealth in the world today is inheritance. I share that fact often, and it always makes people uncomfortable. But what co
By Diego Alcalá · Tue Aug 18 2026 · Investing
By Diego Alcalá
The number one cause of wealth in the world today is inheritance. I share that fact often, and it always makes people uncomfortable. But what comes next is what actually matters: the number one trait separating the people who build that first fortune from the people who merely chase it is patience. And patience is exactly what is scarcest in modern markets.
The skill of doing nothing
Few variables predict an investor's future returns as specifically as the ability to wait. I am not talking about fundamental analysis, market timing, or even asset selection. I am talking about something far more basic: the skill of doing nothing.
Patience in investing is not passivity. It is an active, conscious decision not to act when acting would hurt you. It is resisting the urge to sell when everyone sells, to buy when everyone buys, to change strategy every time a new fashion appears. Jesse Livermore made the same point about his own career: it was sitting still, not thinking, that made him his money.
The big compounding takes years, sometimes decades
Look at the great wealth events of the past few decades. Amazon took seven years to turn a profit. Tesla needed 17 years to post its first full profitable year. Warren Buffett has held Coca-Cola for more than 35 years. The genuinely exponential increases in what a company is worth take years, sometimes decades, and they almost never produce the best short-term returns. In fact, they usually look terrible for long stretches.
Impatience is the most expensive tax an investor pays
Consider the people who bought Bitcoin in 2017 at the 20,000-dollar peak and sold in 2018 at 3,000: they missed the run to 69,000 in 2021. The people who bought property in 2007 and sold at a loss in 2009 missed the recovery and the real estate boom of the decade that followed. The pattern repeats again and again: impatience is the most expensive tax investors pay.
The market is a machine for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. It is not a violent or immediate transfer. It is a steady, almost imperceptible drip that becomes a river over the years. Every unnecessary trade, every panic sale, every euphoric purchase is a small transfer of wealth away from you.
The paradox of the business owner who invests
Knowing all this, a paradox appears. When we play the role of capitalist — the investor putting money into someone else's project — we somehow expect the money back as fast as possible, with the least possible risk, and with the strongest possible guarantees. Put in personal terms, the contradiction is obvious.
So let me ask you: who gave you all those guarantees when you started your own business? Who promised you returns within two years when you put your entire capital into that first company? Didn't it take you years, maybe a decade, to see real results? Didn't you spend nights awake wondering whether you had made the right call?
A business owner told me recently that his company, worth millions of pesos today, produced no real profit for its first four years. "If I had been my own investor," he said, laughing, "I would have fired myself in year two." And yet, when he invests in other people's projects, he expects a 30 % annual return from day one. The disconnect is total.
Three enemies of patience
We live in the age of instant gratification. Amazon delivers in hours. Netflix hands us whole seasons at once. We have trained our brains to expect immediate results in everything, our investments included. But markets operate on timescales that do not respect modern anxiety.
There are three main enemies of an investor's patience. First, the constant media noise that makes us feel something important is always happening. Second, comparison with other people who appear to be winning faster — although we rarely see their losses. Third, and probably the most dangerous, our own mental narrative, which confuses activity with progress.
Why this matters more when you invest across a border
For a Canadian or any other foreign investor building a position in the United States, every one of these pressures is amplified. Distance makes an asset feel less real. Currency movements add a layer of noise on top of the asset's own performance, so a perfectly sound holding can look wrong for months at a time in your home currency. Setting up a company, opening banking relationships, and getting a structure working takes longer from abroad than most people plan for. All of that invites exactly the reaction that costs the most: doing something.
None of this is investment, legal, tax, or immigration advice, and no timeline or return can be promised. But the discipline travels well: if you needed years of patience to build your own business at home, you should extend the same patience to the capital you place abroad.
The test does not come in the good times
Think about the best returns people tell you about. A piece of land bought in 2009 that you considered a mistake for five years is worth ten times what you paid today. Shares of "boring" companies you bought and forgot have comfortably beaten the positions you monitored daily.
The real test of patience does not come in good times, when everything is rising and holding is easy. It comes in the crises, in the moments of panic, when your portfolio is down 30 % and every expert is predicting the end of the world.
Patience also means accepting that there will be long stretches of nothing. Years when your portfolio or your asset does nothing but move sideways while you watch other people show off spectacular gains. Those stretches of "nothing" are what test an investor's temperament.
Think in decades, not in quarters
To build patience, I have found it useful to think in decades rather than quarters. When I evaluate an investment, I ask myself two questions: will this still be relevant in 10 years, and am I comfortable doing nothing with it?
So how many of your best investment opportunities have you lost to impatience, and how many times has your frantic activity been nothing more than an illusion of control in a system that rewards intelligent inaction?
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This article is informational and educational. It is not investment, legal, tax, or immigration advice, nor a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult a licensed professional before making decisions about your capital.
Originally published in Spanish by Diego Alcalá on Comprando América: El tiempo y la paciencia al invertir.