The word entered our vocabulary by accident. A typo on a forum, transcribed and re-transcribed, eventually canonized. There is, of course, a kind of charm in this. A movement that names itself by mistake is at least admitting that it does not take itself entirely seriously, which is a virtue worth preserving in any community organized around the price of things.
But charm alone, the Standards Committee has noted on more than one occasion, is not a sufficient basis for a vocabulary. And so, beginning in the spring of 2024, the Club's internal correspondence quietly retired the term in question and replaced it with one we believe has been doing the same job, more elegantly, for several thousand years.
We do not HODL. We are patient.
The argument for the change
Patience is a virtue with literature behind it. A reader can find essays on patience by Seneca, by Montaigne, by Marcus Aurelius, and (in a more recent and more accessible vein) by Wendell Berry. There is no comparable corpus on HODLing. There is no Penguin Classics edition of On the Holding Of Coins. The intellectual scaffolding, in other words, is not there.
Patience is also, importantly, a state that can be cultivated outside the context of a portfolio. One can be patient with a child, with a soufflé, with a slow waiter, with a long winter. The vocabulary translates. A discipline that translates is a discipline that lasts.
A counterargument
There is a counterargument, which we have heard, and which we acknowledge. The counterargument is that HODLing carries a specific connotation: it refers to holding through volatility, through fear, through the loud opinions of strangers on the internet. Patience, the counterargument goes, is too general to capture this particular variety of restraint.
We are unmoved. The general case includes the specific case. A patient person is, by definition, capable of holding through volatility. The reverse is not true. There are HODLers who would lose their minds at a delayed flight or a corked bottle of wine. Patience is the larger virtue. The smaller word should yield.
There is also, we should mention, a practical consideration. The Club's correspondence is read by associates, by their families, and (in a few cases) by their financial advisors. The word HODL, when read by a financial advisor, tends to invite a particular kind of follow-up conversation. The word patience does not.
We will continue to use patience. We expect, over the coming quarters, that the word will appear in the Liquidity Brief with increasing frequency, and that its appearances will not require explanation. This is the test of any successful vocabulary change. When the new word is no longer noticed, the change has succeeded.
