"Investing shouldn’t keep you busy"

From an interesting article by Yogesh Chabria in MoneyControl:

I’m sure most of you might be wondering if it is really possible to get rich by doing nothing. Some of you might even be thinking that I have surely lost it. That is what one of my close friends, who was taking my advice, thought. She had received a sizeable amount of money after selling some ancestral property around a year ago, and wanted me to help her out with it. It was the first time she was investing in the stock markets, and like most other people, thought that she would spend hours a day, carrying a laptop, trading in stocks and watching business channels. She wanted to be busy with the stock markets.

Fortunately for her, I didn’t allow her to do any of that. I asked her to pursue a hobby, go on a holiday, meet her family, start a business, perform community service or do anything else to keep herself occupied. The stock markets aren’t a great place to be “busy.” I strongly believe that investments aren’t meant to keep you busy; they are meant to make you rich.

Based on my advice, she invested her money in a few companies that had strong fundamentals and a visible growth. I told her to stop looking at the prices everyday and tracking daily upward and downward movements. Just staring at stock prices would not magically make them rise.By doing nothing, she didn’t get scared of temporary falls in stock prices. She didn’t get nervous and sell her stock when it fell by 10%. When the stock rose by 30%, she didn’t feel greedy and sell it either. She didn’t even know about such minor falls or rises.