If you do a chip startup, you need patient investors with very deep pockets.

A few analysts, seeing long-term promise, suggest patient investors consider buying.

And is is at least possible that the market's gyrations will squeeze out all but the most patient, long-term investors saving through corporate retirement plans.

Ms. Vale is a patient investor.

But he is, as Waldmann says, the archetypal risk-neutral, patient investor, and he has a tremendous amount of money invested in banks.

Mr. Whitman is a patient investor in the most traditional sense of the word.

"We are very patient investors," Mr. Meeker said.

Traders seemed to think the stock would interest only patient investors.

Other family members withdrew money, but the Othmers were patient investors, adding money from time to time.

But the same exponential power, so advantageous to patient investors, may be potentially calamitous when applied to human population.