How’s Your Resolution Going?

By Michael Melissinos

As an avid sports fan my entire life, I’ve seen many great players never win the big one. Hell, I’ve seen many teams comprised of great players never win the big one.

The in-fighting. Backstabbing. Competing egos. Power-trips. The overall locker room drama affects the quality of the end-product. No one can win under these conditions.

In the investing world, for example, many people think that if you have a good strategy, you’ll win. That’s all you need. Wrong. You need a good strategy, yes. But you also need to stick to it, especially when you’re riddled with emotions affecting your confidence — which is most of the time.

Not enough people work on this part of their game. They put tremendous effort into finding the best strategy. Tinkering and tweaking until they’re blue in the face. The same goes with diet and fitness.

Sure, people can rattle off the specifics of different kinds of diets but how long can the average person actually stick to one of them? It’s January 17th. People have likely broken their resolutions and are onto Plan B already.

An investing strategy includes the math and our ability to follow the math. It includes our investors, who experience same emotional turbulence we do. It includes our employees. Our family.

The trader needs to execute in the face of these emotions and real-life pressures. For most people, it’s too much. They eventually break their rules. Buy-and-hold stock market investors typically bail out during an extreme bear markets. Trend-following investors typically bail out after a lengthy period of whipsaws.

Those who have a plan have an advantage. They know what to do each day. They know their strategy works. All they have to do is stick to it. Enter: the hard part.

Do you have a plan? Can you write it down on a post-it note? Do you know the degree of volatility and losses to expect over time? How did you behave the last time you experienced some investing pain? Did you stick with it? Did you try something else — something “better”?

It pays to have these kinds of questions answered when tough times rear their ugly head.

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