What Pro Hockey Players Can Teach Us About Investing

The arrival of the NHL playoffs is a timely reminder that natural talent can only take you so far. Hundreds of gifted athletes enter the playoffs every year, but only a select few know what it takes to win it all.

As the founder of SHIELD Athletics , Brandon Coccimiglio has a pretty good idea of what separates the good from the great. The former hockey player spends his days helping instill those essential qualities into the current generation of players, including two-time Stanley Cup champion Carter Verhaeghe; Seattle Kraken first-round pick Shane Wright; and the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Sarah Nurse, Renata Fast and Emma Maltais.

The more Coccimiglio works with elite athletes, the more it becomes clear to him that many of the qualities that make you a great hockey player also make you great in other areas of life – including investing. “Those who want to be the best just think differently,” he says. “They put in the work, and then you find them in the back room doing more work.”

As a do-it-yourself investor, you may never get the glory that the best athletes receive, but by learning how the best hockey players get to the top of their game, you might be able to improve your investing performance.

Hard work pays off

Every high-performance athlete learns about the importance of hard work at an early age. The truly elite, though, constantly improve because they focus on eliminating their weaknesses. “People think the hard work happens in the gym or on the ice, but a lot of it has to do with what they do away from the game,” he explains. “The athlete that wins is the one who’s building good habits every day. They’re becoming resilient. ”

Lesson learned: Investing isn’t just about capitalizing on the ups and downs of the market. It’s understanding your biases, identifying hidden opportunities, learning from experience when to buy and sell and so on. Investors, like athletes, must develop discipline. Small improvements, compounded over time, separate the great from the good.

Knowledge is power
The best athletes aren’t all brawn – they’re also hungry for any information that helps them achieve their goals. For instance, many read books and articles on improving their mindset and skills. As their knowledge and understanding of themselves increases, they’re better equipped to go against the grain. “They’re constantly learning — they read book after book after book,” Coccimiglio says. “It’s all about self-improvement and how they can change their physiology.”

Lesson learned: There is no shortage of materials for investors to study – from investing strategy books to analyst reports that talk about companies in detail. To do well, it maybe a good idea to learn more about the ins and outs of trading and investing. The more you educate yourself, the more confident you’ll become at navigating market uncertainty and finding opportunities others might miss.

Adversity is an opportunity
High-performance athletes make their share of mistakes, but their ability to learn from those mistakes is what separates them from the pack. Pushing forward in the face of failure increases their mental fortitude and makes them more reliable players. “The more adversity a player experiences, the more they grow,” Coccimiglio notes. “They understand that a moment of failure is a moment of learning, and they don’t let it affect their confidence.”

Lesson learned: Effective investors analyze their errors, adjust their strategies and move forward with a renewed sense of confidence. Learning from your mistakes can help shorten the road to success.

Keep calm and carry on
Top athletes excel at nullifying the noise that surrounds them because they’ve operated in high-pressure environments for most of their lives. While they do get down when they mess up, they also learn how to recognize negative emotions and process them without having them get in the way. When teams say they’ve brought in a veteran player who has playoff experience, that’s why – they know, better than others might, how to stay calm. “The ones who have experienced those big moments can show the younger players what to expect,” Coccimiglio says. “They’ve had those feelings before, and they know how to handle them.”

Lesson learned: Investing is a highly emotional endeavour, and feelings often get in the way of good decisions. For instance, loss aversion — the tendency to fear losses more than we value gains — can cause undisciplined investors to make poor decisions at crucial moments. Understanding your emotions and keeping them in check is critical to success.

Practice makes perfect
Every valuable lesson a high-performance athlete learns has been reinforced through thousands of hours of practice. They develop a process that helps them improve, and they never stop working on themselves. “That’s why you’ll still see Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby practising off in the corner of the ice by himself,” Coccimiglio explains. “Maybe he lost the puck in that corner the previous game. Now, he’s working on it 100 times so, next game, he can fix that. It’s just a constant learning curve.”

Lesson learned: Repetition builds mastery on the ice and in the markets. Just as Crosby still fine-tunes his game, great investors review past decisions and adjust their approach for the future. Improvement is an ongoing process, not a one-time event.