Patience is a position.

Two of the companies we cover spent the summer waiting. One is waiting for the last regulatory approval of a merger that was announced a year ago. The other is building a mine that will not ship its first ore for several years, under a licence that permits construction but not yet operation. Neither is doing anything wrong. Both are examples of something the American market, which moves fast and prefers things that move fast with it, tends to misprice.

Waiting has a cost, and it has a shape. For the merger, the cost is that the shares trade on the arithmetic of the deal rather than on the business underneath, which means a holder has bought a probability and a timetable whether they intended to or not. For the mine, the cost is capital: every month of construction is money spent before a dollar comes back, and every month of delay moves the first dollar further away while the interest keeps accruing. These are not reasons to avoid either situation. They are reasons to know which situation you are in.

We have come to think of the calendar as part of the analysis, not a footnote to it. Every brief on this desk ends with the dates that matter: the next approval, the next quarter, the next permit decision. Those dates are where the thesis will be tested, and they are usually public long before they arrive. A reader who writes them down has an edge over a reader who waits for the headline, because the headline is the moment the market re-prices and the date is the moment you could have thought about it.

There is a temperament question here too. The Canadian market has more of these long-dated situations than the American one, partly because so much of it is resources, and resources are slow. Mines take a decade. Pipelines take longer. Uranium contracts run for years and reprice slowly. An investor who finds that tedious should probably look elsewhere, and we would not argue. An investor who finds that the slowness is where the discount comes from, and that the discount is therefore partly a payment for patience, has understood something about why we started.

What would change our view: evidence that the market had begun to price long-dated Canadian assets the way it prices long-dated American ones. That would be good news for existing holders and bad news for this publication. We would take the trade.