1 July is SAF Day and every Singaporean male who has served will know that camp life comes with its own language. The lingo, the jargon, the sarcasm. Overwhelming for newbies, second nature once you’re in. And somehow, despite Gen Z inventing new slang every other week, SAF phrases never die. They get passed down, generation after generation, like a rifle handed to the next poor recruit.
This is still an investing website, so I’ll spare you the nostalgia and get to the point. SAF lingo maps surprisingly well onto investing. Here are five that might just make you a better investor.
1. “Never mind, you take your time.”
Classic sarcasm. The officer is already fuming, and this is his version of a countdown. You take your time? You better not.
In investing, though, take the literal meaning. Compounding needs time, years, decades if you can manage it. Charlie Munger said don’t interrupt it unnecessarily, and he was right. Look at the compounding formula and the exponent is time. That single variable, more than the rate of return, determines the final outcome. Time is the multiplier.
“Take your time” also applies to research. You don’t need many stocks so each pick matters. Be deliberate. Don’t FOMO in just because everyone else seems to be buying. And when the market tanks? Same advice. If you’ve bought quality and not speculation, there’s no need to panic-sell. Sit tight.
The one exception is starting. Compounding only works if you start, and the longer you wait, the less runway you have. If you’ve been procrastinating, picture your sergeant, arms crossed, death stare. “Never mind, you take your time.”
2. “Rush to wait, wait to rush.”
The men never say this to the officer. They mutter it among themselves, usually after sprinting to get ready for an activity only to stand around for an hour. It happens because every level in the chain adds buffer time. By the time the message reaches the men, they’re waiting way too early.
Markets work the opposite way but carry the same lesson. Most people assume stock markets are constantly moving. They’re not. Zoom out and you’ll see that markets spend more time doing nothing than trending in either direction. Range-bound, consolidating, going sideways. Then suddenly something moves.
Individual stocks are even more extreme. Some go nowhere for years. Investors lose patience, sell, and then watch the stock rally the moment they exit. Classic wait-to-rush behaviour.
Take Centurion (SGX: OU8). It flatlined for roughly five years. Then it surged 400%. That’s still more than 30% per year annualised if you counted the waiting. Not bad for doing absolutely nothing.
The market has phases. Sometimes it rushes, sometimes it waits. Know which phase you’re in and stop expecting action when there is none.
3. “My grandma can run faster than you.”
Said during a run, dripping with contempt. Translation: you are embarrassingly slow and you need to move faster.
In investing, people love to compare speed. How fast did you make your returns? Your friend tripled his money in six months. Your colleague caught a ten-bagger. Social media makes this worse. It looks like everyone is printing money except you. So you FOMO in, chasing the next hot thing, wanting to move fast.
The problem? Fast doesn’t mean sustainable. In my webinars, I used to make this point about growth stocks. It’s not about how high the growth rate is, it’s about how long growth can be sustained. Slow and steady over a long period creates more value than explosive growth that burns out in two years. And when that growth collapses, so does the price. Spectacularly.
Speculative stocks dressed up as long-term investments are how investors take massive, unrecoverable losses.
Beyond that, comparing returns is a trap. There will always be someone doing better. Always. Years ago I was running a half marathon and saw a sign that read “run your own race.” It stuck. Investing is personal. You’re not in a race with your neighbour. So what if someone’s grandma runs faster?
4. “You think, I thought, who confirm?”
This one’s my favourite and the most universally applicable. When an officer or sergeant says this, he’s calling out a chain of assumptions. Nobody actually checked. Everyone just assumed someone else did.
We do this constantly in investing. We assume the growth trajectory continues. We assume dividends stay the same. We assume the stock we’re excited about is actually worth buying. We assume the opportunity sent to us by a stranger in a chat group is legitimate.
Due diligence is something most investors claim to do but rarely practise rigorously. We look for information that confirms what we already believe. Blue skies only, no storm clouds. Disconfirming evidence gets ignored. That’s confirmation bias doing its work quietly.
At minimum, double-check your order. Right ticker? Right size? Right direction? Are the numbers you’re relying on from the actual source, or some third-party summary? This matters more now that AI can hallucinate figures convincingly.
Investing may not be a live grenade. But being careless with real money, especially large sums, carries real consequences. The bigger the stake, the more you need to confirm.
5. “Wake up your bloody idea.”
Reserved for the officer’s most exasperated moments. Screamed, not said. You will know he means it.
Investing is a solo activity. Nobody is standing over your shoulder, yelling when you do something stupid. That’s a problem. Without accountability, it’s easy to drift, treating investing like a hobby, buying on a whim, reviewing nothing, learning nothing.
Hobbies cost money. Investing is supposed to make it. That requires actual work. Making decisions deliberately, reviewing outcomes honestly, learning from mistakes, improving over time. Boring? Yes. But that’s the difference between an investor and someone who just buys stocks occasionally and wonders why the results are mixed.
Think of it like going to the gym. You have to show up and do the work. Not sign up for a membership and go whenever you feel like it. And definitely not spend more time shopping for fancy gym gear than actually lifting weights.
No one is going to scream at you. So you have to be the one to wake up your own idea.
Happy SAF Day. Now double-confirm you’ve invested today, wake up your idea, and don’t race with grandmothers.
Fall out.
