In praise of boring

Most capital chases the same handful of exciting stories. We spend more of our time in the parts of the economy nobody photographs: food production, chemicals, insurance, the things the world quietly runs on.

Boring businesses have an underrated quality. Because they are unfashionable, they are rarely overpriced. Because they are essential, they are rarely going away. And because nobody is writing breathless articles about them, the people who run them tend to be operators rather than storytellers. That combination, cheap, durable and unglamorous, is where a great deal of quiet compounding happens.

Excitement is expensive. A business on the cover of a magazine has already been paid for, several times over, in its price. A business that keeps a region fed, or supplies the materials a country is built with, is priced as if it will always just be there. Usually, it will be.

We are not against exciting. We own our share of it. But we have learned to be suspicious of our own enthusiasm and comfortable with our own boredom. The dull businesses have paid for a lot of the interesting ones.