Spend some time on the image above.

Four fictional investors made what appeared to be the worst investment decisions imaginable. One invested at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000. Another invested just before the Global Financial Crisis. A third invested only days before the fastest market crash in modern history during Covid. The last one invested at the very beginning of 2022, when markets were once again about to disappoint investors.

If market timing truly determined investment success, all four should have become cautionary tales. Instead, they became something very different.

They became a reminder that patience and time in the market quietly overwhelms timing the market. There is even a study by Fidelity which shows two types of investors had done very well … one had forgotten they had invested… and the other dead. These two sets of people never interrupt compounding and therefore allow the magical force to work for them.

Almost every investor I have met in the last 21 years is waiting for a better entry point. They are waiting for markets to correct, valuations to become attractive, elections to conclude, interest rates to settle, geopolitics to stabilize or the next piece of economic data to provide certainty. Yet history keeps reminding us that certainty is usually visible only in hindsight.

The irony is that the greatest risk was never investing at the wrong time; it was never investing for long enough.

Markets have always rewarded patience more generously than precision. While investors obsess over finding the perfect day to begin, wealth is quietly created by people who simply stay invested long enough for businesses, innovation and human progress to do what they have done for centuries, create value over time.

That is why the world’s “unluckiest” investors often end up becoming remarkably successful.

They accepted something many people never do. There is no perfect moment to invest. There is only the decision to begin, followed by the discipline to remain.

In investing, your greatest advantage is rarely superior forecasting. It is your willingness to give compounding the only thing it has ever asked for.

Time.