Reuters reported this week that Silver Lake, the big private equity firm, is in talks to buy Workday. No terms have been agreed, though the numbers being floated sit around $43 billion, and a deal anywhere near that figure would rank among the largest software buyouts in history. It would also move one of the steadier enterprise software businesses behind a curtain where public investors can no longer watch it.

For anyone unfamiliar, Workday sells the plumbing that large companies use for payroll, human resources, and finance. The software is tedious by design. Nobody enjoys migrating an HR system, so once a company is on Workday it tends to stay, and the subscription checks keep arriving like a utility bill, except this one grows. Private equity firms love that kind of revenue. They love it the way I love a dividend that shows up without a phone call. The playbook is old: borrow against the steady cash flow, buy the company, tighten margins, then sell it back to the public in five or seven years at a markup. It has worked often enough to keep the money flowing for decades.

So what does this mean for a regular investor? Most of us would meet this deal through an index fund. Workday is roughly a tenth of one percent of the total U.S. stock market, give or take. Say you hold $100,000 in a total market fund. Your slice of Workday is about $100. Analysts have kicked around takeover prices in the $240 to $250 range, but those are guesses stacked on guesses, because no terms have been agreed. If Silver Lake pays a 25 percent premium, a number I picked for the sake of simple math, your gain is around $25. You will not feel it, which is more or less what diversification feels like day to day.

The more interesting part, to me, is the history. Silver Lake has run this exact play before. In 2013 the firm teamed up with Michael Dell to take Dell private for about $25 billion. Shareholders walked away with $13.75 a share plus a 13-cent special dividend, and plenty of them were glad to be out of a supposedly dying PC business. Dell returned to the public markets five years later worth many multiples of that buyout price. I remember the deal well. Plenty of smart people called it an escape hatch at the time. The business didn't die, and the sellers gave up every dollar of what came after.

The quiet cost of a take-private is that you get paid today and hand over tomorrow. Sometimes selling at a premium is the right call. And sometimes you have simply been bought out of a compounder by someone with a longer time horizon than yours. If you held Workday directly, it would be worth asking yourself whether you'd sell, at a 25 percent premium, a business you'd otherwise happily hold for a decade. Your answer tells you what kind of investor you are.

But these are talks, reported by sources, and talks fall apart. I watched the buyout boom of 2006 and 2007 in real time. Deal chatter everywhere. Then 2008 arrived, the music stopped, and a striking number of announced buyouts were renegotiated at lower prices or scrapped altogether. Anyone buying Workday stock right now to capture a deal premium is betting on an announcement, and if the talks collapse the stock usually gives back the pop and then some. I've seen that movie more times than I can count.

My plan is the same as always. Do nothing, keep contributing to the index funds, and let the professionals pay the premium. If Workday goes private at a big number, my fund gets cashed out and reinvests the proceeds the same week. If the deal dies, life goes on. Patience and consistency beat deal-chasing over any period long enough to matter, and no headline changes that.

As always, this is my perspective, not professional financial advice.