Is Stillness an Advantage
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Hi, I’m Papa Phil, the founder of a space called Stock Talk. I combine my decades working in Finance, Entrepreneurship & Technology with my passion and curiosity for finding great companies, to make it easier for people to understand investments and trading.
Most people think stillness is doing nothing.
It isn’t.
Doing nothing is avoidance.
Stillness is a position.
There’s a difference, and it can be expensive to confuse the two.
Right now, the market is loud in a very specific way. Not euphoric loud. Not panicked loud. Anxious loud. The kind of noise that comes from people who don’t know what they’re afraid of yet but are certain they should be afraid of something. AI fatigue. Valuation fatigue. Narrative fatigue. Fourth year of a bull run fatigue, the list goes on and on. Pick your flavor of the week.
We are about to see if we really are getting a Santa Claus rally this year. Defensive names getting love. Consumer staples suddenly “safe.” Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark looking comforting again while companies still building the backbone of the next decade get treated like yesterday’s mistake.
That tells you something, if you’re willing to stand still long enough to see it.
Most people can’t.
They feel pressure to act. To comment. To reposition. To do something that looks like control. That pressure doesn’t come from the market. It comes from discomfort. From the unease of holding a view while the crowd temporarily walks the other way.
Stillness isn’t passive. It’s restraint with a spine.
The hardest skill to learn in markets isn’t how to find ideas. It’s how to stay with the right ones while they stop being popular. When the headlines change tone. When the daily commentary turns sour. When the language shifts from inevitability to skepticism.
That’s where most edges disappear.
Activity gets mistaken for intelligence in those moments. People trade because they feel stupid not trading. They rotate because standing still feels like being wrong. They confuse motion with progress, reaction with insight, and opinion with edge.
Experience breaks that habit, slowly and painfully.
At some point, you stop asking “what’s the market saying today” and start asking “what has actually changed.” Not price. Not sentiment. Not positioning. Not the business. The supply chain? The demand curve? The balance sheet? The moat? The timeline?
Understanding the business changes the entire experience of volatility.
If you know how money is actually made, noise loses its authority. If the fundamentals are intact, price becomes information, not instruction. A move down isn’t an insult. A pause isn’t a failure. A rotation isn’t a verdict.
It’s just time passing.
That’s where clarity starts to look boring to people watching from the outside. There’s no drama in it. No urgency. No cleverness. Just a quiet confidence that doesn’t need reinforcement every hour.
The market rewards that posture eventually, but it tests it first.
Stillness has a cost. That’s why so few people pay it attention.
You give up the dopamine of reacting. You give up the comfort of being aligned with a crowd. You give up the illusion that constant adjustment equals control. You give up the feeling of being “in the know” that comes from having a hot take ready on demand.
What you get instead is something less visible and more durable.
You stop being triggered by headlines that declare everything changed overnight. You stop flinching at every analyst downgrade or television panic cycle. You stop needing confirmation from price action alone. You stop mistaking urgency for importance.
That doesn’t make you smarter. It makes you harder to manipulate.
The market is full of manufactured urgency. Always has been. Someone is always selling a reason to act now, before it’s too late, before the window closes, before the opportunity disappears. That language exists because it works. It pushes people off balance. It forces decisions before understanding has time to settle. I have been a victim of this urgency myself. Learned my lesson from pulling two stocks out way to early, even though I eked out a single digit profit. This happened a couple years ago.
Stillness breaks that spell.
When you know what you own and why you own it, you don’t need to defend it daily. You don’t need to explain it to anyone. You don’t need to perform conviction for an audience. You let time do the work it’s always done.
That’s not sitting on your hands. That’s standing your ground.
The irony is that the market eventually moves in favor of people who appear to be doing the least. Not because they were inactive, but because they were selective about when action was required. They didn’t confuse volatility with information. They didn’t mistake narrative shifts for structural change. They didn’t abandon long arcs because of short attention spans.
Stillness isn’t about patience as a virtue. It’s about patience as a filter.
It filters out noise.
It filters out weak ideas.
It filters out your own worst impulses.
In anxious markets, that filter becomes a competitive advantage.
Most people will never notice it. They’ll be too busy reacting. Too busy rotating. Too busy explaining why they had to do something, anything, just to feel aligned again.
That’s fine. Markets need that energy.
But if you’re looking for edge, real edge, it rarely announces itself. It shows up quietly in moments like this, when nothing feels comfortable, and almost everything feels urgent.
The advantage isn’t speed.
It’s not volume.
It’s not activity.
It’s the ability to stay put while others talk themselves out of positions, they once claimed to believe in.
That’s not exciting.
It’s not cinematic.
It doesn’t photograph well.
It works anyway.
When all the fundamentals, and your gut, tell you everything is ok, everything is ok.
Results are not typical. The methods I teach have helped other traders and investors, but there are no guarantees. Success in trading and investing takes work, discipline, and dedication. Past performance is never a promise of future results. Every trade and investment carries risk.