Know how to lose

One of the most important skills in trading — whether you’re dealing with sports or stocks — is knowing how to lose. You will be on the wrong side of things a lot, and that’s not only normal, it’s inevitable. The key is learning how to absorb losses without letting them distort your judgment. Too many traders and bettors go on tilt after a bad stretch, chasing losses and abandoning the process that got them there in the first place. That’s when small setbacks become career killers.

Knowing how to lose means embracing the reality that variance is part of the game. Even elite results come with plenty of losing. We hit 57% on college basketball over a 10-year period — that’s world-class, a legitimate money printer — but it still means losing 43% of the time. You can’t survive that unless you have patience, discipline, and strong greed management.

Trading will humble you over and over again. It demands toughness, resilience, and self-awareness. The best in the world are not those who never lose, but those who manage loss better than anyone else. They know their edge, they wait for the pendulum to swing back, and they never panic when variance turns against them. Losses don’t define great traders — how they respond to them does.