📖Jeremy Grantham

Patience Is Alpha

🌱 Beginner★★★★★

Patience is the ultimate competitive advantage.

💬

In a world obsessed with quarterly results, patience is the ultimate competitive advantage. Great investments often take years to play out fully.

— GMO Quarterly Letters,2017

🏠 Everyday Analogy

Long-term investing is like planting trees. Early progress looks slow, but compounding happens underground before it becomes visible.

📖 Core Interpretation

Jeremy Grantham frames investing as a compounding game. Time amplifies quality and discipline, while unnecessary activity often destroys long-horizon returns.
💎 Key Insight:Long-term orientation creates opportunities others miss.

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❓ Why It Matters

Short-term noise often forces investors out before value is realized. Long-term discipline increases the odds that fundamentals, not emotions, drive outcomes.

🎯 How to Practice

Extend research and review horizon, reduce unnecessary turnover, and adjust only when intrinsic value, risk, or opportunity cost materially changes.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Calling it long term while never reviewing thesis
Overtrading and damaging compounding
Ignoring opportunity cost and alternatives

📚 Case Studies

1
Dot-Com Bubble Warning (2000)
Grantham publicly warned in 1998–2000 that tech stocks were in a massive bubble, reducing GMO client exposure to overvalued growth and internet shares.
✨ Outcome:Clients underperformed during the final surge, but avoided most of the 2000–2002 crash and preserved substantial capital.
2
Housing and Credit Bubble Call (2007)
Grantham labeled 2005–2007 a global housing and credit bubble, slashing exposure to risky mortgage-linked and leveraged financial assets before the crisis hit.
✨ Outcome:Underperformance before mid-2007, then strong relative results during the 2008 crash as portfolios were less exposed to collapsing financials.

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