Weekly: Patience
Weekly 29 2025 + buy Doubler Portfolio
This week
We received the annual figures from Cake Box, which closed its financial year at the end of March. Once again, the results were solid.
In addition, we reviewed the last two stocks you selected: AAK AB and Van de Velde. There’s also a brief update on K+S and Stellantis.
We’re also making a new purchase for the Doubler Portfolio.
Looking ahead to next week, you can expect the half-year results from Investor AB and Bonava — as always, they’re among the first to report.
Patience is Our Greatest Asset
Among fund managers and analysts, there’s often a focus on what specific expertise might give them an edge over their peers. This serves as a justification for the trust placed in them to manage other people’s money.
Unfortunately, managing other people’s money also brings performance pressure, often coupled with time constraints. After all, you’re constantly being compared to competitors, indices, and other asset managers.
Over the past few years, I’ve personally experienced how real that pressure is. In our case, it was even self-imposed. You want to deliver results for your clients, but because it was our own fund, we didn’t run the risk of being fired.
I can imagine the pressure managers of large funds are under. Unfortunately, every strategy — even the best, like value investing — will go through periods of underperformance. In recent years, momentum investing has taken center stage.
As a private investor, you can of course have specific knowledge about certain sectors, which can give you an advantage. But even without that knowledge, you still have one major asset: your long time horizon. According to Warren Buffett, private investors should only buy shares they’d be willing to hold for ten years. That doesn’t mean you have to hold them that long, but it’s a healthy mindset to have when buying.
Because we, both at Smart Capital/Valuing Dutchman and in our fund, aren’t burdened by constant performance pressure, we can afford to patiently wait until a stock’s value is recognized. We even add to our position when prices are pushed down — sometimes to an almost ridiculous degree.
We have the luxury of thinking like business owners. What matters is the company’s performance, not the ups and downs of the share price. It’s not unusual for me to go a week without checking prices. Custom alerts notify me if a stock dips below our buy limit or rises above our sell limit.
As long as you have confidence in the business you co-own, short-term price movements don’t matter. In fact, large fluctuations create opportunities to buy or sell.
That long-term horizon — and not following the markets daily — also protects us from the biggest pitfall investors face: our own emotions. There’s a lot of emotion in the market right now, and that emotion is greed. We’re waiting for fear to take over, because that’s when real bargains appear. In the meantime, there are always individual stocks presenting opportunities worth acting on.
So for now, it’s a time to occasionally take profits — and wait patiently, with cash at the ready, for those bargains to come.