Warren Buffett once said that “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for 10 years, don’t even think about owning it for 10 minutes.” However, there are only so many decades in our life. Are you willing to spend, as Buffett suggested, 10 years holding stocks? Would it be worth your time? Holding stocks for the long term has big rewards. Pull out any long-term stock market index chart of at least 20 years or more, and it is often a straight line that starts from the lower left and rises to the upper right. Take the US S&P 500 Stock Index for example, it has returned approximately 8% annualised gains over the last 70 years, turning US$100,000 into over US$21.9 million dollars. Despite the evidence of huge returns over the long term, most people don’t hold stocks for the long term. A recent analysis by Reuters using New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) data indicated that the average investor...