Every so often a headline promises wisdom and hands you a listicle instead. This one, from MSN, at least leans on an old idea worth revisiting: the market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run. Benjamin Graham said that before most of us were born, and it remains the most useful sentence ever written about stock prices.

The short-run part is the voting machine. Prices move on sentiment, headlines, and whatever story happens to be fashionable that quarter. Right now the votes are pouring into anything with the letters A and I attached to it. Two years ago they went elsewhere. They will go somewhere else again.

The long-run part is the weighing machine. Eventually a company's price settles toward what the business actually earns. Not always precisely, and not on any schedule you can trade around. But over years, earnings do the weighing.

The writer goes on to name a sector he's buying, and I won't spoil the reveal except to say it's the kind of unloved corner that voting-machine neglect tends to create. These opportunities form because everyone got bored and voted somewhere else, not because anyone discovered a secret.

I'd add one caution, and it's the same one I keep adding. If you own a total market index fund, you already own that sector, at market weight, without having to guess which one it is. The patient investor's edge is simply the willingness to hold the whole weighing machine while everyone else lines up at the voting booth. No hot sector pick required.

The article is worth a read for the framing alone. Just remember the framing is the value. The sector pick is one man's vote.

As always, this is perspective from forty years of managing my own money, not professional financial advice.