Should investors just do nothing?

All you had to do was nothing

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a friend — let’s call him B. 

B was one of the first people ever to try Navexa, the investment performance tracking platform which brings you this newsletter. 

In doing so, B was also the first person to request that our platform support performance tracking not just for stocks, but for digital assets, too. 

Reason being, he had some Bitcoin and stocks he wanted to properly track and report on (something which, surprisingly, brokers, exchanges and wallets don’t make easy). 

So we built the capability into the product, and B duly added the trades he wished to properly track. 

Six trades, to be exact:

Three Bitcoin buys, and three ASX-listed stocks (two in the mining space, and one in the blockchain space). 

Now here’s where B’s story gets intriguing. 

Shortly after the last trade he entered in his portfolio, he stopped keeping track. 

He moved overseas for a career opportunity, did a bunch more investing and trading, changed his tax jurisdiction (which included navigating exit taxes...), and generally forgot about his Navexa account. 

Which brings us back to our dinner a couple of weeks ago. 

B told me that all these years later, he still receives weekly and monthly portfolio update emails regarding those trades he made between 2013 and 2018. 

His Navexa portfolio has become a window into an alternate timeline in B’s life — one in which he only made those six trades, and did nothing else. 

Eight years since the last trade in the portfolio, this is what could have been:

A $722,051 capital gain — more than 918% a year since inception — from $8,242 of starting capital. 

The three ASX stocks, combined, are down $4,151.88.

One of them — AVZ — isn't just down. It's gone. 

At its peak, AVZ Minerals was valued at $2.8 billion. Its lithium project in the Democratic Republic of Congo got tangled in a two-year ownership dispute, the stock was suspended in May 2022, and in May 2024 — having never traded again — it was formally struck from the official list of the Australian Securities Exchange. 

The BTC position — bought in three small, almost accidental instalments for a combined outlay of just $2,165 — would now be worth $728,368.90.

And that’s the key here: would.

Because like I said, this account stopped reflecting B’s actual trades and investments almost 10 years ago. The reality is that he, in his words, ‘got chopped up’ by trading his Bitcoin for other digital assets, and then trading again, and again, buying and selling and incurring all the fees and friction which doing so entails. 

His Navexa account is now a testament to what could have been. The update emails a weekly and monthly reminder that if he’d only sat tight all these years, his barely $2,000 BTC investment would be worth the best part of a million dollars, having peaked at more than $1,400,000 in late 2025. 

As B said to me at dinner: ‘All I had to do was nothing.’

Why dead investors tend to outperform the living

I haven’t engineered this story for the sake of a newsletter.

It’s not just true. It’s common. 

There’s a legendary, possibly mythical, impossible to accurately source, Fidelity internal review of which client accounts had performed best between 2003 and 2013. 

The answer wasn't the day traders. It wasn't the ones with the most sophisticated advisers, or the most rebalancing, or the most attention. 

The best-performing accounts belonged to investors who had died. 

The second-best belonged to people who had simply forgotten they had an account.

This has nothing to do with dying or forgetting, really. It has to do with time. 

Because long term, markets tend to reward this same pattern.

A $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 between 1996 and 2025 turned into $192,167.

That’s about 10.3% a year, compounded for 30 years. 

Miss just the 10 best days of that period, and the return falls by $106,677, with a CAGR of about 7.4%.

Miss the best 30 days, and it falls by $161,044 compared to remaining fully invested. 

Missing just these 30 days across the 30 years effectively cost nearly everything.

It takes the annualized performance down to just 3.83% a year — barely ahead of inflation, and a fraction of the 10.27% the ‘fully invested’ portfolio generated. 

There’s a cruelty in this mechanism: the best days don't arrive during calm times. 

The overwhelming majority of the market's best days happen during, or immediately after, its worst ones. 

To dodge a crash, one must likely dodge a rebound, too, since they are usually the same event wearing different faces, a few days apart.

This is why we have the maxim: time in the market beats timing the market. 

In the scenario above, as in B’s alternate timeline portfolio, all one had to do (having first made intelligent investment decisions — which is a whole other story), is nothing. 

Why doing nothing feels irresponsible

So if the data is this lopsided, why doesn't everyone just buy and forget?

Because doing nothing has never felt like a strategy. It feels like negligence.

There's a well-documented asymmetry in how we process regret. 

If you act and it goes badly, that's a mistake — painful, but explicable. You took a swing. Gave it your best shot. Better to have tried and failed, and so forth. 

If you don't act, and it goes badly anyway, that failure feels worse, somehow, even though the financial outcome might be identical. 

Inaction regret has a particular sting to it: the nagging sense that you could have done something, and chose comfort instead.

So we act. 

We rebalance, we rotate, we take profits, we cut losses, we add the ‘promising’ small cap, we trim the position that's ‘had a good run’. 

We tell ourselves we’re stewarding our wealth, when many times all we’re doing is meddling and muddying the water for no real reason. 

B’s alternate timeline portfolio, and the Hartford Funds graphic, show you the profound power of doing nothing, and allowing time to work its compounding magic.

Getting out of our own way

The uncomfortable truth here is very simple.

B's story shows that single highest-returning decision in this entire portfolio was not a decision at all. It was the absence of one.

Forget research, conviction, timing, rebalancing, trying to read technical indicators or trade the news. 

His alternate timeline account sits there, tracking every dollar and percentage point of growth he could have captured, a ghost of compounding that could have been, a monument to the one move that costs nothing, requires no skill, and that almost nobody can bring themselves to make.

This week's quote:

"Don't just do something, stand there."

— attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard

Invest in knowledge,

Thom

The Benchmark

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