Why Doing Less Is Often the Smartest Investment Decision You Can Make

By Andrew Langdon, CFP®, CSLP®, EA, MBA

Every veterinarian knows the feeling of sitting across from a client who wants you to do something. The animal is stable. The labs look reasonable. The clinical picture doesn’t call for intervention yet. But the owner is anxious, and anxiety has a way of creating pressure to act. The experienced clinician knows that watchful waiting, the deliberate decision to monitor rather than intervene, is often the most sophisticated and appropriate course of action available. Doing something just to relieve that pressure can cause more harm than the underlying condition.

The same dynamic plays out in investing, more often than most people realize.

What Behavioral Scientists Call Action Bias

There is a well-documented psychological tendency called action bias, which describes our instinct to do something when faced with uncertainty, even when doing nothing would produce a better outcome. It shows up across medicine, sports, and business, and it is especially common in personal finance.

When markets drop, the instinct is to make a change. When a new investment strategy gets attention, the instinct is to add it. When a portfolio feels too simple, the instinct is to make it more sophisticated. None of these impulses are irrational. They come from the same place as the pet owner who wants you to run more tests — a genuine desire to feel like something is being done.

The problem is that in investing, activity and progress are not the same thing. In fact, research consistently shows that the average investor significantly underperforms their own investments over time, and the gap is almost entirely explained by behavior, not by the quality of the underlying funds or the timing of markets. People buy after things go up, sell after things go down, add complexity when simplicity was working, and change course when patience was the right call.

A Pattern I See Regularly

I have a client who does almost everything right. They save consistently, have solid account diversification across pre-tax, Roth, and taxable accounts, and a straightforward investment framework built around broadly diversified, low-cost funds. By most measures, their financial picture is in good shape.

And yet at almost every meeting, somewhere in the conversation, comes the same question: what else should I be doing?

I understand the instinct completely. When something matters this much, doing nothing feels irresponsible. Surely there is another account to open, another fund to add, another strategy worth layering in. The brain equates activity with progress, and in most areas of life, that is actually true. Work harder, produce more. Put in more effort, get better results.

Investing is one of the few areas where that relationship breaks down. A simple, diversified portfolio that you leave alone will outperform a complicated one you tinker with. Not sometimes. Consistently, over time, across virtually every study that has looked at this question.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For veterinarians, especially those with both W2 and 1099 income, the temptation to overcomplicate things is real. There are many accounts available: traditional 401(k), Roth IRA, Solo 401(k), HSA, taxable brokerage, and more. There are decisions around student loans, tax filing strategy, and practice ownership. It can feel like there is always something else to address.

Some of that complexity is real and worth working through carefully. But once the right structure is in place, the job becomes largely one of staying the course, not continuously reinventing it. The most valuable thing a financial plan can do at that point is give you a framework confident enough that the right answer to most market questions is to do nothing.

A few principles worth holding onto:

• A broadly diversified, low-cost portfolio captures the returns that markets offer over time. The goal is not to beat the market, it is to participate in it consistently without getting in your own way.
• Every additional holding or strategy is a new decision point. Decision points create opportunities to make behavioral mistakes, and behavioral mistakes are where real money gets lost.
• Periods of economic uncertainty and market volatility are exactly when the plan matters most. Changing course in response to short-term noise is the investing equivalent of intervening on a stable patient because the owner is anxious.

The Harder Decision

Watchful waiting is not passive. It is a deliberate clinical choice made after careful assessment, grounded in experience and evidence. It requires you to tolerate uncertainty without reacting to it, which is genuinely difficult when something important is at stake.

The same is true in investing. Choosing not to act when everything around you feels uncertain is not complacency. It is discipline, and for most long-term investors, it is where the real returns come from.

The question worth asking is not what else should I be doing. It is whether what I already have in place is sound enough that staying the course is the right move. Usually, if the foundation is built well, the answer is yes.

If any of this resonates or you have questions about your own situation, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out at andrew@vetworthfinancial.com or find some time on my calendar for casual, no sales introductory call.