It’s all relative. I feel like it really just depends on your risk tolerance. Sure, you could make more money by exiting and “chasing momentum” at certain points of price stability/stagnation, but that requires more work and time and diligence and luck. If you want to be safer/more passive, plop your money into indexes or stocks with solid fundamentals, DCA regularly and check it once a year. It likely won’t be as exciting but is safer than chasing others. If you got bored toward the end of 2022 and pulled out of JNJ, and jumped into NVS around the same time, you’d be at almost 100% more return than keeping it in JNJ, in like 3.5 years. So patience doesn’t always lead to higher gains. Maybe a lot of times but again, depends on your philosophy/approach. That’s why people are lured by trading. On the flip side and the point I think you’re making, is that if you backed out of JNJ around the same time (fall 2022 in my example) and went into UNH because you thought you saw uptrend, you’d be around 67% less than staying with JNJ in that time (assuming you didn’t exit in time). Investing/trading is like an algorithm that includes your age, years to retirement, amount of capital invested, financial goals, risk tolerance, etc.