In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, he tells a story about Ted Williams and The Science of Hitting.
Williams broke the strike zone into dozens of squares. He knew exactly where his sweet spot was. Wait for a pitch there, and he’d hit .400. Chase something on the lower corner, and he’d fall to .235. Same batter. Same ability. Just different discipline.
Buffett’s takeaway is one of the most important idea I’ve encountered in investing.
In baseball, patience has a limit. If the count goes to 0–2 and the ball clips the edge of the zone, you still have to swing. Otherwise, you’re called out. The game forces your hand.
In investing, there are no called strikes.
You can watch a thousand companies go by. You can sit still for months, even years. Nothing forces your move. The only way you get a strike is if you swing and miss.
That’s an enormous structural advantage.
And I’ve been throwing it away.
I’ll be honest. I fall into this trap constantly.
The market moves every day. Something is always going up. Someone in my feed is rotating into something new. A chart looks compelling. A thesis feels urgent. And before I know it, I’m swinging not because the pitch is good, but because doing nothing feels irresponsible.
This is exactly what Buffett warns against.
You’re standing there, bat on your shoulder, and the audience is yelling: swing, you bum. Over time, that noise gets inside you. The pressure isn’t from the game. It’s from the crowd. And the crowd is relentless.
What makes it worse is liquidity. Stocks can be traded in seconds, at almost zero cost. That should be a massive advantage: no lock-ups, no friction, just clean access to great businesses. But Buffett is clear: most people turn it into a disadvantage. They confuse the ability to act with the need to act.
A farmer doesn’t check land prices daily and wonder if he should sell. A private equity investor can’t exit on a whim. The illiquidity forces patience. Stock investors have no such constraint, so they manufacture urgency instead.
Buffett even said markets today exhibit far more casino-like behavior than when he was young and that the casino now resides in many homes and daily tempts the occupants. He wrote that decades ago. It’s more true now than ever, with apps designed to keep you trading and notifications engineered to create anxiety.
Rule #1, as he puts it simply: never lose money. Every unnecessary swing is a chance to do exactly that.
In his 2024 shareholder letter, Buffett put a number on it.
The arena we operate in has been and will be rewarding if you make a couple of good decisions during a lifetime and avoid serious mistakes.
A couple. Not dozens. Not every quarter. A handful of great decisions across an entire investing life is enough.
A single winning decision can make a breathtaking difference over time. Berkshire’s Apple position. Coca-Cola. American Express. These weren’t the product of frantic activity. They were the product of waiting, sometimes for years and then swinging hard when the pitch was right.
As Buffett wrote in the letter: mistakes fade away; winners can forever blossom. What matters isn’t your batting average. It’s your slugging and the magnitude of the right calls, not the frequency of all of them.
So here’s the reframe that I keep coming back to.
Inactivity is not laziness. Waiting is not weakness. Doing nothing when pitches are bad is not a failure of discipline. It is discipline.
The market will always be loud. There will always be something to trade, something to react to, something that looks like opportunity if you squint hard enough. The skill is in knowing the difference between a pitch in your sweet spot and one on the edge — and having the conviction to let the bad ones go.
Buffett once said that the problem isn’t that the pitches aren’t there. The problem is psychological. If you let the crowd get to you, you’ll swing anyway.
So the real question isn’t whether you know the theory.
It’s whether, when the noise is loudest and everyone around you is acting, you can stand there with the bat on your shoulder and wait.
That’s the game. And most of us, myself included, are still learning how to play it.
Each week I share a learning from some of the best investors. Sources this week: Warren Buffett’s Becoming Warren Buffett interview, Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting*, and Berkshire Hathaway’s 2024 Annual Letter.*
