I can't stand traffic. A traffic jam is waiting with a steering wheel in your hands.
A few weeks ago I was on I-55 between St. Louis and Chicago. Everything stopped. Both lanes, a long line of brake lights, the kind of jam where you know the next half hour is gone.
A few cars back, a sedan started working. He cut right into a gap that was barely a gap. Two cars later he cut back left. Then right again, into the lane that had just moved a car length. Every time a lane moved, he was in it. Brake lights, a lurch, a horn from somebody he'd surprised. He looked like he was fighting the traffic, and the traffic was winning.
I watched him for a long time, mostly because there was nothing else to watch. When the jam finally broke, he was a handful of cars ahead of me. That's it. Fifteen minutes of lane changes, horns, and hard braking, and he had gained about the length of a driveway.
I Used to Be That Guy
I should admit something. In high school I drove about twenty miles of busy interstate to school and back, every day for three years, and I drove it exactly like that. It was a game. Every gap was a point. Every car I got around was a small win. It was a lot more fun than sitting there. I don't remember ever getting to school much earlier. I do remember that it felt like I was doing something, and when you hate waiting, that is most of the appeal.
Those three years left a mark, just not the one you'd expect. When I got to choose where to live as an adult, I chose a place close to my office. I hadn't learned to weave better. I had learned that I would rather not be in the jam at all.
So I understand the guy in the sedan. He isn't crazy and he isn't stupid. He's bored and impatient, and weaving feels like action. The problem is that the feeling is lying to him.
The Other Lane Is Always Faster
If you have ever been sure the lane next to you was moving better, you are not imagining the feeling. You are imagining the fact.
A physician in Toronto and a statistician at Stanford studied this in 1999. They built a computer simulation of stop-and-go traffic where every lane moved at exactly the same average speed. Then they looked at what a driver in one of those lanes would see. Even though no lane was faster, the next lane looked faster most of the time.
The reason is simple once you hear it. When your lane is moving, you pass a cluster of stopped cars in a few seconds. When your lane is stopped, the spread-out cars in the moving lane take much longer to go by you. So you spend far more time being passed than passing, even though the totals come out even. Your brain keeps score by time, not by count, and it decides you picked the wrong lane.
They tested it on people, too. They showed video of real Toronto traffic to 120 driving students. Seven out of ten said the next lane was faster. It was actually a little slower. One of the researchers summed it up in a line I keep coming back to. The gains may be an illusion, but the risks are always real.
Look at the Cars
I can't prove this next part with a study, only with a lot of miles. Watch the cars that drive like that. Not always, but often enough that I now expect it, they are dinged up. A crumpled rear quarter panel. A bumper that got clipped and never fixed. Scrapes down the side where a mirror met something. The car is keeping a record of how it gets driven.
That isn't a coincidence. Lane changes are a small share of driving but a steady share of crashes. And insurance companies have known for years that drivers whose phones record a lot of hard braking and hard acceleration are the ones who file claims. The scratches are the bill for those few car lengths, paid a little at a time over years.
Meanwhile, I was listening to a book on Audible. I still hated the jam. But we got to the same place at about the same time, and I got there in better shape, with no new dents.
The Same Jam, With Money
I think investing is like a lot of other things in life. The same human habits show up everywhere, and a traffic jam is one of the clearest places to watch them. The impatience. The certainty that the other lane is faster. The urge to do something just to feel like you're doing something. All of it carries over to money.
The market gets stuck, or it just gets boring, and somebody notices that the other lane looks faster. A fund a friend mentioned. A stock that ran forty percent last quarter. A new asset class that everybody suddenly seems to own. So they change lanes. Then the new thing stalls and the old thing moves forward, so they change back. Every move costs something. Taxes, fees, the gap between where they sold and where they bought, and the chance that this opening wasn't really an opening.
The result looks the same, too. People who chase tend to end up a few car lengths from where they would have been anyway. Once in a while they get further. More often the record shows a lot of scratches: a fund bought at the top, a stock sold at the bottom, a tax bill for the privilege of switching. The investing version of body damage is quieter than a crumpled fender, but it adds up the same way.
Boring Is a Choice
I never learned to like traffic. I did learn to stop fighting it, and where I could, I arranged my life so there was less of it. Staying in your lane means accepting that you'll be there a while, and that the lane next to you will look better for stretches of that time. It also means trusting that the jam ends, and that when it does, everybody in every lane gets moving again.
You won't be perfect at this. I still drive badly sometimes. I'm late, or I'm frustrated, and I make a move I'd roll my eyes at from the next lane over. I'm human. The same is true with money. Everyone eventually makes a decision that came from a mood or an impulse rather than a plan. The goal isn't to never do it. The goal is to do it less, to catch it a little sooner each time, and to stack enough good decisions on top of each other that the occasional bad one doesn't matter much.
That is most of what good investing asks of you. Pick a sensible lane. Stay in it most of the time. Find something better to do with the trip than the brake pedal. Let the guy in the sedan burn his energy and his bumpers. You'll pull up next to him at the exit.