That time the G.O.A.T. didn’t make the cut
Trading success lessons from a Hall of Fame basketball savant
Here’s a crazy fact for you:
Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, was once cut from his basketball team!
It’s true.
Back in his high school days, he tried out for the team.
”So that morning we all went in there, and the list was up. I had a friend, and we went in to look at the list together.
”We stood there and looked for our names. If your name was on the list, you were still on the team. If your name wasn`t on the list, you were cut. His name was on the list. He made it. Mine wasn`t on the list.”
You can probably guess the rest of the story:
He went to the coach and pleaded for another chance. The coach, of course, said no but did let him carry uniforms for the team.
So there Jordan was, an equipment manager for the team that cut him. Watching his dreams from the sidelines. Unable to do anything about it.
Until the summer break.
Then he started working his tail off, putting in all kinds of practice. So much practice his mom said, “That basketball never left his hand.”
That next year, he made the team.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Even the greatest of all time had to work hard to achieve success.
Stories like this remind me how foolish it is to rely on my smarts & talent alone.
I worked hard in high school to give myself a boost in college. But in college I sort of coasted. I chose a major that wasn’t much of an intellectual challenge for me (business instead of engineering) and made solid grades mostly on my impressive short-term memory.
i.e., I’m a really good test taker.
That’s helped me a lot over the years.
But I tried to coast through graduate school too — that did not go well.
I did graduate with a Master’s in Seminary, but I was crawling across the finish line.
That’s a story for another time.
Today’s story is about the hard work we have to put in if we want to be good, or even great, at something.
I wasn’t born with an innate sense of reading stock charts.
Instead, I spent hundreds of hours pouring over thousands of tickers across 4 years to learn how to read the patterns of the market.
To be fair, some industries still elude me. (I’m looking at you, bio-tech.)
But most of the big ones, technology most of all, make sense to me when I look at the charts.
Of course, reading charts is merely an exercise in educated guessing. All I’m doing is stacking probabilities in my favor. Basically, looking for times when there’s a better than average chance the ticker will move up rather than down.
But the markets do what they want to do.
One of my early charting mentors used to say that the “markets can remain irrational longer than a trader can remain solvent.” Meaning, just because everything on the chart indicates a ticker should move up doesn’t mean it actually will move up.
Sometimes they just do weird things.
Thankfully, I have a trading strategy that allows me to be wrong and still make money.
All I need is the patience to wait things out. Plus I get to collect premium while I wait.
Getting paid to wait on a (currently) losing trade is awesome!
If you want to check out my (still a work in progress) system, here’s the link:
— Ricky Ketchum
Sources:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1991/05/15/when-jordan-cried-behind-closed-doors/