Tragedies of Miracles
Dwight Eisenhower ate a hamburger for lunch on September 23, 1955. Later that evening he complained of chest pain and told his wife the onions gave him heartburn. Then he began to panic. The president was having a massive heart attack. It could easily have killed him. If it had, Eisenhower would have joined more than seven hundred thousand Americans who died of heart disease that year.
But since then with advancement of healthcare, the age-adjusted death rate per capita from heart disease has declined more than 70 percent since the 1950s, according to the National Institutes of Health. Had the rate not declined since 1950s, twenty-five million more Americans would have died from heart disease in last 70 years. So cutting the fatality rate by 70 percent led to a massive number of lives saved that is hard to comprehend – Twenty-five million Lives!
Why are we not shouting in the streets about how incredible this is and building statues for cardiologists? – Because the improvement happened too slowly for anyone to notice. The average annual decline in heart disease mortality between 1950 and 2014 was (just) 1.5 percent per year.
If the headlines read ‘Heart Disease rate decline 1.5% last year’, you would yawn and move on. But this tiny number saved Twenty-five million Lives. Compounding takes a while but cannot ignore it.
Healthcare has interesting compounding history. Historian David Wooton says it took 200 years for discovering to the medical acceptance that germs cause disease, another 30 years to discover antisepsis and another 60 years to research and put penicillin into the use.
Compounding has always been boring and long term process.
Remember the race of a hare and a tortoise, even in real life tortoise would win just because he is steady and advancing to the goal. While the hare runs but often gets distracted with surroundings and stops its journey.
Millions of examples have been given and thousands of time it has been experienced that Investors those who sail through volatile time in market, emerges as very successful investors. Purpose of an SIP is only to keep investment journey ongoing even in most negative market where it becomes easy and automatic to purchase units at lower cost. If investors breaks this continuity, the whole purpose of SIP gets defeated.
At Shalibhadra, we are proud to say that our investors have been very learned that they have continued their SIP journey even in most volatile times of the market.
Nishit Siddharth Shah