Zhou Wang

The Hard Part of Investing: Allow Your Money to Work for You Zhou Wang

"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient."      Warren Buffett      Your money can earn 3.69% or 11.11%. It is up to you now.       The hardest part of investing is allowing your money to work for you. Buffett, perhaps the greatest investor of all time, with 60 years experience, boils down the stock market to ... patience.        Patience is important in life and in building wealth. Most investors are not patient so most investors are not wealthy. In fact, the average investor earns only 3.69% a year vs. 11.11% for the market long-term. DALBAR's QAIB       Mr Buffett's strategy of patience is the most successful. He earns about 20% a year compounded over time. He does not buy and sell stock. In other words, he does the opposite of what Wall Street tells us to do.        Most investors jump from one successful stock or mutual fund to another. Each time they do this, they are basically paying at the higher price AFTER the security has proved successful. When the price goes down, they sell--paying commissions going up and down. Meanwhile Patient Mr Buffett earns 19.7%.      Buffett's strategy means that once we establish our stock mutual fund portfolio, we do nothing. We allow our money to labor for us. It never collects unemployment. Buffett has been patient for over 40 years and has grown his initial investment of $6,000 (from paper routes) to $65 billion. You don't need to do a thing to grow your money in the stock market. As Buffett has said:        We continue to make more money when snoring than when active.