Patience Pays: Warren Buffett’s Last Lesson to an Impatient Market

When Warren Buffett told shareholders on 3 May 2025 that Greg Abel would take the chief‑executive’s chair at Berkshire Hathaway by year‑end, the headlines dwelt on succession and possible break‑ups. Yet the moment also closed the chapter on something rarer: a six‑decade public demonstration that long horizons beat fast hands. Buffett’s departure invites a closer look at the dictum he gave Forbes back in 1989—“the stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” It was true then; it is truer now, in a market whose average holding period has collapsed from eight years in the 1950s to barely six months in 2020.¹

Modern markets hum with algorithms tuned to news‑second frequencies, retail apps gamified to foment FOMO, and commentators who declare every two‑per‑cent pull‑back a regime change. Hyper‑bolic discounting—the human urge for an immediate gain over a larger deferred one—has found perfect technological amplifiers. Platforms reward the micro‑thrill of doing something now; social feeds elevate the trader who nailed Nvidia’s last wiggle, not the one who quietly compounded Visa for a decade. In such an ecosystem, impatience levies a hidden tax: frictional costs mount, timing errors proliferate, and attention drifts from what builds wealth—time in the market, not timing the market.

Berkshire’s six‑year courtship of Apple is a vivid illustration. Roughly $40 billion deployed between 2016‑18 is worth about $175 billion today,² a return harvested not through clever rotations but by letting operating excellence and buy‑backs work quietly. Many retail investors, by contrast, bailed out during the 2022 tech rout—only to chase the shares again on their rebound. Money slipped, almost invisibly, from restless hands to patient ones.

Patience, of course, is not mere waiting; it is a discipline of consistent, almost boring behaviour. In a recent essay I argued that small acts, repeated, compound far beyond sporadic bursts of intensity. The principle maps neatly onto investing. A 7 per cent annual return doubles capital roughly every decade; miss the best ten trading days of each decade and that rate collapses. Impatience, then, is expensive: the decision to exit at a spike of volatility may feel prudent, yet it forfeits the rebound that often follows.

Buffett’s own record exemplifies deliberate consistency. In the 1980s he likened investments to a “twenty‑punch card”: if you were allowed just twenty big decisions in life you would think far harder about each. That mindset inoculates against the dopamine loops of zero‑commission trading apps; it also aligns with behavioural research showing that forced friction—cool‑off periods, decision journals, automated drip‑feeding—reduces impulsive error.

Will Berkshire remain a temple of patience now its sage recedes? Early signals suggest so: Abel, who has run the energy division for two decades, champions the same capital‑allocation sobriety, and Buffett will stay on as chair.³ Yet the broader market may not follow. Index funds have lengthened some holding periods, but algorithmic dominance shortens others; frictionless apps ensure the cost of action is virtually nil. The impatience tax persists, merely changing collectors—from floor brokers of the twentieth century to high‑frequency desks and platform designers today.

Regulation cannot outlaw impatience, but design can blunt its edge. Pension auto‑enrolment harnesses inertia for good; drip‑feed investing removes timing temptation; decision journals force investors to articulate thesis and horizon before acts of panic. We can, in short, engineer environments where patience feels easier than flight.

Buffett’s retirement is not just corporate housekeeping; it is a prompt to revisit first principles before the next headline intrudes. His career reminds us that wealth hinges less on IQ than temperament; that markets reward those who treat boredom as a moat; and that consistency, sustained through dull years as well as dazzling ones, outperforms brilliance applied sporadically. In a week dominated by hot takes on succession, the quieter story is that the market machine keeps running, siphoning capital from the hurried to the steadfast. Whether we stand on the paying end or the collecting end of that transfer is a choice—one made not in May 2025’s flurry of news, but in the patient cadence of our own decisions thereafter.

Reference links

1. Visual Capitalist, “The Decline of Long‑Term Investing”, 3 Aug 2020
2. Financial Times, “Berkshire after Buffett: can any stockpicker follow the Oracle?”, 2024
3. Reuters, “Buffett to step down as Berkshire CEO…”, 3 May 2025