Investors have never had more information at their fingertips. Newsfeeds refresh by the second, financial TV runs on a 24-hour loop, and social media is engineered to keep us clicking. Even the newest tools of our time, large language models like ChatGPT, can serve up an articulate answer in seconds.
But this abundance is misleading. Most of it is noise — forgettable snippets with a half-life of hours. Headlines are designed not to inform but to funnel us deeper into a product or subscription. LLMs (Large Language Models), for all their fluency, are built to support and flatter our prompts, not to reason with originality or forecast with accuracy. They cannot yet do the one thing that defines good investing: to pause, weigh evidence, and think independently at the second level.
We aren’t ready to hand over the reins of rational, deep, or creative thought. Not yet.
The retreat from noise
The greatest investors of our time understood this long before the digital deluge. They deliberately engineered their environments to cultivate clarity.
- Warren Buffett chose Omaha over Wall Street so he could think in peace. He still spends most of his day reading quietly, with no interruptions.
- Charlie Munger built his reputation on inversion — focusing on avoiding folly rather than chasing brilliance. That, too, requires quiet.
- Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria, founders of the Nomad Partnership, ran their fund from a small room above a Chinese herbalist in Chelsea, London. They didn’t even have desks or Bloomberg terminals, just reading chairs. In that simplicity, they compounded at more than 20% a year for a decade.
- Bill Miller, a philosophy grad and military intelligence officer prior to being a fund manager, thought about markets differently. When the dot-com crash drove the consensus to declare Amazon worthless, Miller tuned out the noise and doubled down. He became the largest shareholder without the surname Bezos, setting off one of the most remarkable market-beating streaks in history.
- Guy Spier retreated to Zurich, creating what he calls a “temple of calm.” His environment was designed to encourage slow, deliberate thought rather than reactive decision-making.
As William Green describes in Richer, Wiser, Happier, the edge is not in doing more, but in doing less — subtraction. Jason Zweig once wrote to him about Munger, Miller, and Buffett: “Their skill is self-honesty. They don’t lie to themselves about what they are and aren’t good at. Being honest with yourself like that has to be part of the secret. It’s so hard and so painful to do, but so important.”
In other words, these investors protect their minds. They filter out what doesn’t matter so they can focus on what does.
Hagstrom and the art of thinking slowly
No writer has captured this better than Robert Hagstrom, author of The Warren Buffett Way and Investing: The Last Liberal Art. Hagstrom argues that modern markets are awash with static — countless signals generated by traders, algorithms, momentum players, and macro tourists. He borrows from Claude Shannon’s theory of communication: when too much noise overwhelms the channel, the message is lost.
Hagstrom’s answer is not speed but slowness. He urges investors to treat investing as a liberal art — drawing on philosophy, psychology, and history, not just financial models. His practice is one of calm reading, thinking, and synthesising across disciplines. That is the true contrarian act in a world addicted to immediacy.
Or as he once put it: “We are not in the information business, we are in the thinking business.”
Behaviour before analysis
Closer to home, Howard Coleman of Teaminvest makes a similar point: unless you can manage your behaviour, analysis won’t save you. The ability to tune out noise — to avoid being swayed by every market twitch — is the precondition for considered judgment.
Second-level thinking
The distinction is clear. First-level thinking reacts to the market: “The stock is down, it must be bad.” Second-level thinking goes deeper: “Why is it down? Has the intrinsic value changed? Or is this just fear?”
Second-level thinking doesn’t emerge from speed or more data. It grows in environments designed for patience, honesty, and reflection. It requires subtraction, not addition.
The real edge
What unites Buffett in Omaha, Sleep and Zakaria in their reading chairs, Miller in his contrarian conviction, Spier in his Zurich office, and Munger in his relentless inversion is not access to faster information. It is the courage to avoid noise.
Their edge wasn’t derived from consuming more. It was from doing less, more deeply. In the calm, they found clarity. And in clarity, they won.
Leigh Gant is the Founder and CEO at Unio Growth Partners. This article is for general information purposes only as it does not consider the individual circumstances of any person. Investors should seek professional investment advice before acting.