Stocks for the Long Run : the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-term Investment Strategies

21

CHAPTER

STRUCTURING A PORTFOLIO

FOR LONG-TERM GROWTH

[The] long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long

run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a

task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us when the storm is

long past, the ocean will be flat.

JOHNMAYNARDKEYNES, 1924^1

My favorite holding period is forever.

WARRENBUFFETT, 1994^2

No one can argue with Keynes’s statement that in the long run we are all

dead. But a vision of the long run must serve as a guide for action today.

Those who keep their focus and perspective during trying times are far

more likely to emerge as successful investors. Knowing that the sea will

be flat after the storm passes is not useless, as Keynes asserted, but enor-

mously comforting.

359

(^1) John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 80.
(^2) Linda Grant, “Striking Out at Wall Street,” U.S. News & World Report, June 20, 1994, p. 58.
Copyright © 2008, 2002, 1998, 1994 by Jeremy J. Siegel. Click here for terms of use.