Investing, Like Gardening, Requires Patience - CharReg

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/21491521-charreg/5297877-investing-like-gardening-requires-patience

It’s interesting to me that when Chowder’s blogs go off-topic, it’s often about gardening. Perhaps it’s because similar skills and approaches are needed to optimize the likelihood of success. Both investing and gardening require planning, sowing, nurturing, maintaining, and finally, harvesting.

Planning: With any endeavor, the best chance for success requires a plan. The investor decides on an overall approach such as dividend income or total capital gains, sector allocation, and stock characteristics necessary for selection. The gardener similarly chooses methodologies such as organic practices and gardening procedures such as soil amendments and irrigation.

Sowing: Once an overall plan is in place, investors pick and invest in stocks much like gardeners pick and plant seeds or starts.

Nurturing: An investor’s plan may call for reinvesting dividends or pooling funds to buy new stocks, as well as incrementally adding new money on a periodic basis. A gardener’s plan calls for regular fertilizing/composting, pruning, weeding, and watering. Both have a goal of making their portfolio or garden grow and flourish.

Maintaining: Maintenance tasks for investors might include trimming fast-growing stocks or selling stocks of troubled companies, much like a gardener will prune back aggressive growth or eradicate diseased plants.

Harvesting: While the lifecycle of an investment portfolio typically lasts decades and a vegetable garden may only last a year at a time, the ultimate goal is to reap and benefit from an abundant harvest. Harvesting a portfolio allows for sustenance during retirement while harvesting a garden may include veggies for dinner or flowers for the table.

It’s not surprising that so many of us investors are also gardeners – both require similar skillsets and mindsets, especially patience.