While most writers will give you correlations (or lack thereof) between betting in sports and “betting” on stocks, this writer wishes to explore are different relationship between sports and stocks. This post is to share the similarities between sports persons’ training/winning methods and good stock investors’ methods. Why? Because we, constantly, get inspired by sports and sports icons just as we get awestruck by the likes Warren Buffet and Carl Icahn!
Education
While there are just a few organized credible avenues to learn better investing, there are certainly, enough unorganized (read social, aggregated content) sources of experiential data and anecdotal information that can be clubbed together to create a good knowledge bank. This could contain are wide array of best practices, successful investing strategies, news and analysis methods and behavioural data from social media. Notice that this approach fits the sports narrative like a glove (no pun intended). Receiving Education does not mean, per se, going to school. Successful sports persons constantly focus on upgrading their skill sets, learning to adapt to pitches outside and keeping a keen eye on their competition.
Practice
As Mark Twain said, don’t let your education “interfere” with your learning! One can’t overstate the role of Practice in sports but it’s interesting to note that the same applies to Investing as well. It takes time to get to know stocks – of different kinds and industries. But the more closely we correlate this with resilience of those in stock markets, the more improved we will end up becoming.
Chutzpah
This one’s new! These days, not having the gumption and amibition to create a large portfolio is for the passive investor. Deep research, understanding of the business ecosystem and the ability to take calculated risks helps some investors generate significant wins time and again.
Similarly, sports is all about passion, confidence and the desire to hit it close-the-baseline all the time. On most occassions, it’s these traits that will help the sports person take that extra risk that sometimes comes-off and makes for a stupendous success.
Stamina
Last but not the least, the ability to stay longer in the game, almost, always trumps everything else. Be it seeing through rough tides or making a higher number of winning bets, the longer you can stay in the markets the higher your chances of succeeding. Some of the smartest investors strategise their presence very well by investing just the right amounts of money during their early days.
This is not unlike sports persons who succeed, more often than not, by punching above their weight, running a marathon with greater consistency and returning every volley.