Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Zweig recently reprinted a series of articles in which he described the 7 virtues of great investors (found here). Each of them could be the subject of a blog post. The one we're focusing on today is Patience. Or rather, the lack of it.<\/p>\n
Between the 1970s and today, the average holding time for a US stock has fallen from 5 years to 10 months. And we're talking about the average.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Take Tesla: around 4% of its capitalization is traded every day. In other, over-simplifying terms, this means that 4% of shareholders leave every day, replaced by 4% of new shareholders. After two days, it's 8% and so on. After 25 days, all the original shareholders have been replaced (in reality, this is not true: some shares have not been sold - those of Elon Musk, for example - and others have been exchanged several times).<\/span><\/p>\n There are more radical examples. Take Upstart, an intermediary company for consumer loans. Far from being an obscure microcap, it weighs in at $3 billion. Since the beginning of May, 14% of its shares have been traded every day: at this rate, the list of shareholders changes completely in 7 days. This is not an isolated example. You'll find the same thing, for example, at Carvana, specialized in buying\/selling used cars: over 4 billion in capitalization, in the red since its IPO in 2017 (1.5 billion in losses by 2022), and a mountain of debt. 17% of its shares are traded every day. For both Upstart and Carvana, the share price has tripled since the beginning of May. There's been a whiff of 2021 in the air for some time now.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 2023, as 50 years ago, it's vital to think like an owner and to see ourselves for what we are: business owners with know-how, employees, customers... not a few pixels on a screen. Obviously, this means reconciling investment time with company time: our job is more like \"watching paint dry\", as economist Paul Samuelson (Nobel Prize winner in 1970) put it, than playing musical chairs.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jason Zweig, journaliste au Wall Street Journal, a r\u00e9cemment repris une s\u00e9rie d\u2019articles dans lesquels il d\u00e9crivait les 7 vertus des grands investisseurs (que vous retrouverez ici). Chacune…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4108,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-le-billet-de-monocle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n