People Who Buy Houses Rarely Check Prices Every Day
Most people research a house thoroughly before buying — the foundation, the school district, the neighbors, the crime rate. It's a big decision, worth the effort. But once they've moved in, few check the property's value online every day. Most stay put for five, ten years or longer, and over that stretch, they almost always come out ahead.
Stock investors tend to do the opposite. Many spend less than 15 minutes researching before buying, insist they're in it for the long haul, then check the price the very next day. And while friends usually congratulate you on a new house, stocks invite the opposite — there's always someone online talking down your position, reveling in a dip, twisting facts, or inventing stories outright. That's exactly why stock investors are so much more vulnerable to short-term noise.
News Is Often a Product, Designed on Purpose
The starkest example is a service Truth Social recently rolled out — packaging the timing gap on presidential posts into a paid API sold to high-frequency trading firms. The market already knows that policy-related posts move stocks the instant they're published. Traders used to just refresh the page and watch. Now, for a fee, firms can receive the post milliseconds before everyone else and let algorithms trade on it instantly. In other words, the news itself became a product — whoever can pay gets there first. That's the raw shape of what "the news" often really is: not an objective fact sitting out in the world, but something engineered, meant to reach specific people first, in exchange for an advantage.
When Fake News Meets an Earnings Report
Google recently became a target for exactly this kind of manipulation. One account flipped its stance within two days — first calling Google a multi-year short, then days later suggesting it was time to buy ahead of a product launch — as if words carried no cost at all. Another account built credibility by claiming to spend $500,000 a month on Google ads, then argued the company's search business was being eaten alive by AI. The post drew nearly a million views and 5,700 likes. The problem: Google's own earnings and its CEO's public remarks directly contradicted the claim — search volume hit an all-time high, search revenue grew 17%, and cloud revenue jumped 82%. When corrected with the actual numbers, the account didn't back down. It said it trusted its own instincts more.
A similar pattern played out with Netflix. A widely shared article claimed viewers were abandoning shows after one season, framing it as a serious problem for the company. It sparked heavy discussion. But Netflix's CEO directly pushed back on an earnings call, saying this year's season-two viewership decline had actually improved compared to the year before. Confronted with the correction, the reporter still didn't concede, saying how others interpreted the piece wasn't his concern.
What both cases share is simple: the people spreading these claims, even when confronted with hard numbers, almost never admit they were wrong. Because the point of the story was never to convey the truth in the first place.
Even Professional Managers Can't Withstand the Pressure
If retail investors get swept up by narrative, professional fund managers may have it worse. In 2026, only 28% of actively managed funds beat the market, well below the historical norm of 40% to 60%. The trend has worsened for years, and the damage has been brutal — one fund lost $50 billion in a single year, more than half its assets, after betting against the AI and tech rally that ended up dominating the market.
That kind of sustained underperformance can break even the most disciplined investor. Respected value manager Terry Smith is a case in point. His philosophy for years was simple: buy good companies, don't overpay, then do nothing — hold for the long run. But after years of trailing the market, investors began pulling money out of his fund en masse. In his latest letter to shareholders, he admitted he'd now have to pay closer attention to short-term momentum, something he'd resisted for decades. He was candid that this wasn't a change in belief — it was survival. There's little point being proven right about the dangers of momentum investing after your fund has already closed.
Buffett Faced Something Even Worse
Warren Buffett lived through a version of this same pressure back in 1999 — and his numbers were worse than Terry Smith's. That year, Berkshire fell 22% while the market gained 19%, a gap of more than 40 percentage points. Financial press openly questioned whether Buffett had lost his edge. Nearly everyone believed value investing was dead.
In that year's shareholder letter, Buffett made no excuses, calling it the worst relative year of his career. But he changed nothing. He didn't chase the hot tech names of the era — he said plainly that he had no way of knowing which companies would actually survive the mania, so he stayed within what he understood. He also issued a warning: once investor expectations became more realistic, the correction would likely be severe, especially in the sectors where speculation had concentrated most. That warning nearly predicted the dot-com crash that followed the very next year.
What happened next proved the point. When the crash hit in 2001 and the market collapsed, Berkshire's stock began climbing. Over the following six or seven years, Berkshire gained 24% while the market posted a loss. Stretched out from 1998 to 2013, Berkshire's stock rose 207%, versus 67% for the market — roughly triple the return.
You Have to Finish the Race Before You Can Win It
Terry Smith's letter cites an old racing maxim: to finish first, you must first finish. It applies to investing just as well. Short-term standings were never the point — surviving to the finish line is. Terry Smith wasn't forced to change because his principles were wrong. He was forced because he manages other people's money, money that can be pulled at any time, and his fund couldn't survive long enough to be proven right. Buffett could hold his ground because Berkshire had permanent capital — no one could force him out early.
That's an advantage individual investors actually have — no quarterly reports to answer to, and time on your side, as long as the noise doesn't steer your decisions. But knowing that in theory is one thing. Actually holding your ground when a downturn hits is another. Most people don't fail because their principles were wrong — they fail in the exact moment fear kicks in, and they stop investing, or worse, sell.
That's exactly why a disciplined approach like dollar cost averaging matters. It doesn't ask you to judge whether a headline deserves your trust, or to guess where the bottom is before buying again. It just means the decision to keep investing gets made in advance, on a fixed schedule — so there's nothing left to decide in the exact moment fear is loudest and the noise is most convincing. A downturn was never an interruption to long-term investing. It's simply part of what long-term investing always involves — the same way you have to crouch before you can jump. The fear and temptation that come with the news cycle always pass. What actually determines the outcome is whether you can hold the discipline through the moments that make you want to quit.
Figures compiled from public market data, company earnings reports, and investor letters from Terry Smith and Warren Buffett.
