On paper, long-term investing sounds straightforward.
Its entire strategy is in its name: holding stocks for the long run.
In other words, you buy a stock, you hold it, and wait for it to appreciate.
Simple, right? Well, not quite.
In my view, long-term investing is more than just the act of buying and holding.
It’s a way of thinking — a mindset — if you will.
Let me explain.
Buy because you want to own the business
When some investors say they are “investing for the long term”, what they really mean is that they bought a stock and plan to sit on it.
But there’s a problem with this framing.
Randomly picking a stock and holding it for years does not make you a long-term investor.
It just makes you someone with a stock.
Long-term investors buy a business because they want to own it — not the other way around.
This distinction matters.
When you buy with the intention of holding for years, everything changes.
You start paying closer attention to the business, not the share price.
You study how the company performs for many years, through different economic cycles.
You watch how management behaves when things go wrong, because for any business, no matter how great, things will eventually go wrong.
You are focused on longevity, including leadership succession.
In short, you are building a mentality.
The six-year stress test
If you wanted to test whether your long-term mindset was real or imagined, the last six years have been an enormous stress test.
According to wealth manager Ben Carlson, investors have experienced almost a decade of volatility compressed into the first half of this decade.
It’s not hard to guess why.
Think about what we have lived through: a global pandemic, the sharpest rise in interest rates in 35 years between 2022 and 2023, followed by 2025’s Liberation Day tariffs rattling global trade.
It hasn’t gotten better in 2026 either.
The Middle East conflict and closure of the Strait of Hormuz have re-ignited volatility in the stock market, sending share prices up one day only to reverse course the next day.
Even as the stock market reached new highs last Friday (24 April 2026), it remains on a knife’s edge.
Individual businesses have not been spared during this period.
Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), for instance, lost more than a million subscribers in the first half of 2022 (1H2022).
Consequently, the media declared the business finished, pointing to the crowded field of competitors and the lack of quality content.
For a brief moment, this narrative felt true.
Shares of the online streaming company fell by over 75 per cent from its 2021 peak.
Yet anyone with a long-term mindset would have paused before selling.
Why?
Because a quarter — or even two — is hardly enough time to judge a business’s response to new challenges.
In fact, those who have followed Netflix’s growth trajectory over the past two decades would have known that this is neither the first time it has lost subscribers nor the first time the company has pivoted its business in a new direction.
Take the company’s botched 2011 attempt to spin off its DVD-by-mail service into a separate company called Qwikster, alongside a 60 per cent price hike on its combined services.
The reaction was savage.
Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers in a single quarter, marking its first decline in years.
Shares cratered by nearly 80 per cent.
Yet co-founder Reed Hastings reversed course within 23 days, doubled down on streaming, and the rest is history.
The verdict?
Since losing a million customers in 1H’22, the online streaming giant has added over 100 million subscribers, putting to rest any doubt that its business can no longer grow.
In turn, those who held on would have seen Netflix shares jump by nearly 470 per cent from its 2022 lows.
Now, you may think that it’s the result of simply holding the stock through the thick and thin.
But you’ll only be partially right.
The real story is the conviction to keep holding for the long haul — backed by the accumulated knowledge of the business over decades.
That’s the difference.
Your success is not one moment — it’s many
Another common misconception is that long-term investing success hinges on one brilliant decision: the perfect stock at the perfect price, executed at the perfect time.
That cannot be further from the truth.
Long-term success is built from steady investing over long periods of time.
In fact, you give the business room to prove itself, and critically, you give yourself room to keep learning.
If you plan to hold stocks for the long run, then a single stock purchase cannot be a verdict on your entire investing journey.
The real test is whether you have the discipline to chart your path forward — adding to your winners, giving stumbling companies enough time to recover, and walking away only when the underlying business shows signs of permanent decline.
The lessons worth learning are long-term in nature, too.
A mistake made last quarter might teach you a small lesson.
A mistake made five years ago, viewed with the benefit of everything that unfolded since, can teach you a far bigger lesson than any other short-term lesson.
But you cannot rely on memory alone.
Our minds are unreliable narrators, especially after turbulent periods.
That’s why keeping good records matters.
Not just of the stocks you buy, but of how you behaved during different market cycles — the moments you nearly sold, the moments you panicked, the moments you did nothing.
Over time, your journal becomes a mirror.
And in investing, the most important thing to understand is ultimately yourself.
Get Smart: The paradox of effort
Let me leave you with a thought.
Charlie Munger once said that the big money is not in the buying or selling, but in the waiting.
Think about what that really means.
If waiting, or doing nothing, produces the best results, then what is the point of all the feverish activity that defines today’s volatile market?
The refreshing of stock tickers.
The reaction to every headline. The constant buying and selling.
All that effort, and for what?
The long-term investor flips the question.
Instead of asking what more they should be doing, they ask what less they can do.
After all, what could be better than sitting, doing nothing, and watching the results come in over the years?
That is not laziness, mind you.
That is the long-term mindset working exactly as intended — letting time, not effort, do the heavy lifting.
So what are experienced investors actually doing right now? Our FREE report reveals how to position your portfolio amid volatility. Download it for free here.
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Disclosure: Chin Hui Leong owns shares of Netflix.
