your-attention-is-part-of-your-po – Ray Street – Wordsrite
**Your Attention Is Part of Your Portfolio**
Attention may be one of the most undervalued assets in investing.
When our attention becomes fragmented, we stop examining businesses and start reacting to price movements. We chase headlines, refresh charts, follow whatever is suddenly trending and abandon long-term decisions because something newer has appeared on the screen.
Markets are very good at creating urgency.
Good investing often requires the opposite.
A company needs time to grow earnings. A strategy needs time to work. Compounding needs years to become interesting. Even doing nothing can be an important decision, but doing nothing becomes difficult when every notification suggests that something must be done immediately.
A shorter attention span does not merely make us less informed.
It makes us easier to influence.
This is one reason I like #Wordsrite. It is a text-first space where an idea can be read, considered and answered with another idea. Not everything has to become a fifteen-second performance competing for the next swipe.
Reading longer thoughts exercises the same qualities that investing needs:
Patience.
Context.
Independent judgement.
The ability to remain with something after the initial excitement has passed.
We talk frequently about allocating money carefully.
Perhaps we should be equally careful about allocating attention.
After all, poor attention usually reaches your decisions before poor returns do.