Patience is a virtue of good investors

For so many times, I hear people and myself complaining and crying over the spilled milk, the inertia of our holdings, taking profit too quickly, and cutting loss just before the turnning point.

But patience is a virtue for all the good investors. The term investor is so different from the term trader. Traders only care about the momentum in a day or several days to several weeks. Investors normally have a much longer time horizon.

I am constantly questioning myself. Am I an investor or a trader? Do I want to be an investor or a trader? I think I must make clear of this so that I could deal with the short term volatility with calm and patience.

Take TCM for example, I bought at 9.98 a while ago. The newly IPOed Chinese medicine stock went down to as low as 9.21 after my purchase, making a paper loss of 7.7%. But does this matter if I believe it is a fairly valued stock? However, my patience runs out before the dawn came, I set a sell limit of 9.98 to get out even. This morning, analyst initiated coverage and rated the stock "sector outperform" and the stock went up to 10.05 instantly. My shares are gone leaving me with yet another lesson of the importance of being patient. Well, the positive thing is that I did not cut loss early this time, right?