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MARKET COMMENT
By
Carburton Street, London -- What has happened to that wonderful human quality called patience? The Oxford English Dictionary defines patience as calm endurance under pain or weariness or provocation. Sadly, many investors today are neither calm nor able to endure pain or weariness or provocation. Many of us monitor our stock holdings on an almost daily basis in the expectation that those shares have ticked up another couple of notches. And when they don't, we scour the Internet for reasons that might explain their apparent fall from favour. Quite often, there are no reasons for their decline in values, only that there is an oversupply of those shares on the market. But of course it is always a good idea to keep on top of events that might affect the way the companies that we are invested in react to changes in the business environment. However, to be consumed with a morbid interest in background noise simply reduces our ability to endure pain and provocation over the long haul. On our Investment Strategies discussion board, TMFMayn posed the question of whether any investor who buys shares any longer believes that investing in a company is the same as buying a part interest in the business. Those who do will already appreciate the concept of total return: in other words, evaluating dividends as well as capital gains when assessing earnings. As investors, we should be aware that the stock market will inevitably go through periods of high volatility. These explosive moments can plunge our investments into losses that appear to be almost unrecoverable. This is the time when we need to summon up our ability to weather the pain and endure the weariness and provocation. We should remember the stock market has an uncanny knack of staging recoveries when we least expect it, and this will reward the patient who have stayed invested through the good times and the bad. Investment Strategies discussion board | The US Fool on market noise