New research by Jinghan Cai at the University of Scranton has established this. He and his colleagues studied the activity of 1.6m investors in new flotations on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. They found that more patient investors - those who waited a few days before buying - saw higher returns than those who were so impatient they bought as soon as possible.
What's more, patience isn't wholly innate. They also found that, at least in this context, it can be learned. "More experienced investors tend to be more patient, and patience leads to higher returns," says Professor Cai.
This is not the only evidence. Mark Seasholes at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Lei Feng at Harvard Business School have found that experience teaches investors to be more patient about holding onto winning stocks. Partly because of this, some US researchers have found that more experienced investors get higher risk-adjusted returns.
However, this isn't to say that learning is fast or perfect. In a study of Indian investors Harvard University's John Campbell found "no evidence of rational learning". One reason for this is that if investors get good returns by sheer luck they can fall into bad habits such as trading too much or chasing overpriced growth stocks. And Tyler Shumway at the University of Michigan shows that a lot of investors' learning consists not of picking up good habits but simply of discovering that stock-picking is not for them and so they leave the market.
What's more, patience isn't always an investment virtue. Yes, it is if we don't rush into overpriced new flotations and if we're patient enough to hold onto winners. But impatience can also be a good thing, if it leads us to sell losing stocks quickly.
Nor even is the patient gathering of information necessarily a good thing. In stock markets there is a high ratio of noise to signal, which means that a lot of what we learn will be irrelevant. But it might give us an illusion of knowledge and overconfidence - which can be counter-productive.
Patiently waiting for the right price can also be dangerous. It can cause us to fall foul of what Daniel Davies at Frontline Analysts calls Mayhew's law: "Anyone who turns down an important deal because of price, will end up doing the same deal at a worse price". The investor who was patient during the tech bubble would have picked up bargains if he'd waited until 2003, but not if he'd only waited until 2000.
The point here is simply that there are no lawlike generalisations in the social sciences: patience is sometimes a virtue, sometimes not and investors sometimes learn and sometimes don't. Such a claim should be trivial - but many people find it hard to accept.
