A Chapter in My Late Start Retirement Journey
In my last post, I wrote about selling my Samsung stock too early. I closed it out with the lesson that the market rewards patience, not guessing.
“I finally understood, this time, exactly what it means that the ones who made money forgot their password.”
There’s a joke that the people who actually made money in stocks are the ones who forgot their password, or never learned how to trade in the first place. Recently, I finally understood exactly what that joke means.
The Years Ignorance Kept Me Calm
The ultimate goal of investing in stocks, for me, has stopped being simple “long-term investing” and become retirement itself. Which also means I don’t actually need to watch the daily ups and downs of the market.
Looking back, my 401(k) grew steadily for years, and in all that time, I never once worried about the market’s swings. But that wasn’t because I understood long-term investing.
The reason was simpler than that. The amount going into my 401(k) each paycheck wasn’t large, and I thought of it less as investing and more as money that disappeared automatically, like a tax. And above all, it was money I couldn’t touch until retirement anyway.
During the 2008 mortgage crisis, and again during the pandemic crash, market crashes always sounded like other people’s problem to me. The news would run headlines about “the biggest drop in history,” and coworkers would sigh looking at their 401(k) balances, but none of it really registered with me. It wasn’t money I could touch, and I’d never paid close attention to it in the first place, so there was nothing for me to watch fall.
Where the Irony Started
Then, as retirement started to feel real, things changed.
I started studying finance and taking a genuine interest in investing. I increased my 401(k) contributions, and started managing my Roth IRA myself, directly.
And that’s exactly when a habit I’d never had before showed up.
I started logging into my retirement accounts constantly, checking how much a particular stock had gone up or down that day — even though I had no intention of touching any of it, buying or selling, right now.
The irony was that my knowledge and my anxiety started growing at exactly the same moment.
Hence the joke: the people who made money in stocks are the ones who forgot their password, or never learned how to trade.
It sounds like a punchline, but sitting with it, it lines up exactly with my own story. Back when I didn’t even know how to log in or sell, I was the one who wasn’t rattled by the market’s swings.
What I Went Looking For
This new habit was bothering me enough that I went and read Fidelity’s article, “How to Be a Smart Investor: 7 Investing Mistakes to Avoid.” What I’m going through right now lines up almost exactly with the mistakes it warns about.
Selling emotionally in response to volatility. Checking your account often isn’t dangerous by itself. The danger is that checking often raises the odds you’ll sell emotionally on a bad day. Historically, markets have recovered from every crisis and gone on to hit new highs — but the recovery often starts before the headlines feel reassuring again. The more often you check, the greater the temptation to sell at exactly the most nerve-wracking moment, right before that recovery begins. It also stung to read that assuming you can get out during a downturn and time your way back in perfectly is itself the mistake. I’d already proven, with that Samsung stock, that I don’t have that particular talent.
Chasing yesterday’s winner. Checking a specific stock’s price every day tends to pull you toward believing it will keep climbing, and toward putting more of your attention there. But market leadership can shift at any time. The more concentrated you are in a handful of stocks or a single sector, the bigger the risk when that leadership changes.
Investing without a detailed long-term plan. Looking back, this habit of mine grew out of exactly this gap — I’d only gotten as far as “taking an interest,” without ever building a concrete long-term plan. If I’d had an actual plan grounded in goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance, I could have been checking whether I was on track with that plan, instead of how much a stock moved today. The article also notes that a plan isn’t something you set once and forget — it should be revisited at least once a year. For someone checking his balance daily, what I actually need is the opposite rhythm.
What I’m Relearning
Back when I had no knowledge, my ignorance is what protected me. Now that I have the knowledge, what I’m learning is that it takes a deliberate discipline to turn that knowledge into something useful — knowing isn’t enough; it takes the restraint not to act on every little thing you now understand.
Not checking the account constantly. When I do check, looking at whether I’m still on track with the plan rather than at today’s move. And revisiting that plan itself at least once a year.
In my last post, I wrote that the market rewards patience. What I’ve relearned this time is that patience doesn’t just happen on its own. The patience of not knowing how to sell is a completely different thing from the patience of knowing how, and choosing not to.
I think I’m at the stage now where I need to learn the second kind.