The Investment Lesson Hidden in Spain’s 1-0 Victory
Winning investors know something impatient investors don’t: The scoreboard isn’t always telling the whole story.
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Hello, Reader.
0-0
The score remained deadlocked for nearly two hours.
In last night’s FIFA World Cup championship game, Argentina goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez repeatedly denied Spain with spectacular saves (and set a Men’s World Cup Final record in the process).
Despite controlling much of the match, Spain had nothing on the scoreboard to show for it.
Other teams might have abandoned their game plan in search of a breakthrough. Spain didn’t. They stayed committed to their patient, possession-based approach, trusting that if they kept making the right decisions, the win would eventually come.
It did.
Substitute Ferran Torres scored the winning goal in the 106th minute of extra time, giving Spain a 1-0 victory over defending champion Argentina.
The lesson of commitment and patience extends far beyond soccer. Success often belongs to those willing to endure uncomfortable stretches without abandoning the process. Markets work much the same way. They often delay rewarding good decisions – but the delay doesn’t invalidate them.
No one understood this dynamic better than Jean-Marie Eveillard, the long-time portfolio manager of the First Eagle Global Fund (SGENX).
During his first decade running the fund, Eveillard was a superstar — his fund returned 236% from inception through March 1997, versus 133% for the MSCI World Index. Then he looked around at the market, didn’t like what he saw, and started trimming positions, raising cash, and adding some gold exposure.
For three years, he suffered the slings and arrows of miserable relative performance.
Between March 1997 and March 2000, while the Nasdaq Composite nearly tripled, First Eagle posted a total return of just 28%. Clients cashed out, and the fund nearly shut down.
But Eveillard was unflappable. “I would rather lose half of our shareholders,” he said, “than half of our shareholders’ money.”
As it turned out, he did lose about half his shareholders. Then the cycle turned.
In the 10 years from March 2000 to March 2010, the S&P 500 and the iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA) – which tracks the performance of large- and mid-cap companies – both produced negative total returns, while the First Eagle Global Fund more than tripled.
Prudence, it turned out, was prudent after all. It just required an uncomfortable wait.
Seth Klarman, whose Baupost Fund returned 15.9% per year during the “lost decade” of 1998 to 2008 while the S&P 500 lost 1.4% annually, has described the psychological burden of this approach with characteristic precision: “You must ignore the market and go against the grain in the short term [in order] to win in the long term.”
Now, I am not claiming to be an Eveillard, or even a victorious Spanish athlete. But I applaud his disciplined approach… and consider it to be especially relevant and timely in today’s exuberant market.
That is precisely why I’ve been looking beyond the market’s AI darlings.
I’ll share how that same principle has guided my own investment approach below. But first, let’s take a look at what we covered here at Smart Money last week.
Smart Money Roundup
AI Is No Longer Just Building Companies – It’s Funding Them
July 15, 2026
Lyzr Inc. recently raised $100 million. But it’s not the amount that makes Lyzr interesting, it’s how it raised the money… by using one of its own AI agents to do it. Here’s what this means for the Agentic Reckoning.
Before You Buy the Dip, Check the Calendar
July 16, 2026
Memory and data storage stocks have dominated the AI market for the past few years, achieving such huge gains that many investors wonder whether there’s still money to be made. TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan explains how recurring seasonal patterns have historically helped identify more favorable times to buy and sell individual stocks.
How to Beat Wall Street’s “Easy Button”
July 18, 2026
In early 2005, Staples launched a new ad campaign that introduced the world to the “easy” button. Now, wouldn’t it be great if investors also had a similar button to press? Well, they might. Tom Yeung shares why the best long-term returns often come from a mix of turnaround stocks and fast-growing companies trading at fair prices.
The Nile Flooded Every Year — So Does This Stock
July 19, 2026
Looking back can often help us see what’s likely to happen next. That approach has enabled Keith Kaplan and his team at TradeSmith to deliver notable investment gains for their subscribers. Instead of predicting market moves based on gut or headlines, they created a software system that looks to history to identify calendar windows optimal for investing.
Why Patience Is Paying Off
Spain didn’t abandon its style because the scoreboard remained 0-0.
Eveillard didn’t abandon his discipline because the Nasdaq was soaring.
And last October, I didn’t believe investors should abandon every company outside the AI trade simply because the market had become infatuated with it.
I asserted that “AI Survivor” stocks could be the kinds of investments that produce surprisingly strong results over the coming years. As I stated in that Fry’s Investment Report monthly issue:
The world’s most future-proof companies may not be the ones building AI technologies, but the ones that have nothing to do with them.
Since then, the Magnificent Seven stocks have advanced just 5.9%, on average. By comparison, the specific AI Survivor stock I recommended in the October issue, has advanced 43%.
More broadly, the Fry’s Investment Report portfolio, configured as it was in mid-October, has gained an average of 17.8%. In other words, the rotation I anticipated may have already begun.
You can learn how to access my “AI Survivor” recommendations here.
Admittedly, these stocks rarely spark the kind of excitement surrounding AI favorites like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), Broadcom Inc. (AVGO), or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). Neither will they dominate the financial media this summer.
But they could deliver surprisingly strong returns as the AI frenzy fades.
To be clear, I am not predicting that high-flying AI stocks will plummet tomorrow, or next quarter, or next year. Rotations take time. Sentiment changes slowly. And investors who abandon a sound strategy too early often miss the payoff they’re waiting for.
That’s why I continue to believe the market’s hypercritical treatment of non-AI companies is creating compelling opportunities.
These businesses don’t need to become the market’s newest obsession. They simply need to keep executing until the market recognizes what was there all along.
Regards,
