Trade Alert: High School Hoops Story Reminds Us To Stay In The Game

A few weeks ago, my parents gave me a bunch of boxes from my youth that they’d had stored at their house forever, including some old VHS tapes of my high school basketball glory days when we’d lost most of our games even as I led the state in scoring my senior year. I had my assistant pack a few of the tapes into a box and send it to one of those places that turns them into digital files and sends you a link.

So I clicked on a link to one of the game tape files from and watched a few minutes of it. Our hometown Ruidoso Warriors were facing Silver City in Silver where they’d beaten so badly back in my sophomore year that I’d literally made a cardboard poster of the score and hung it on my ceiling — Ruidoso 47, Silver 111. Well here my senior year, I was now one of the tallest and built guys on the court and I watched mesmerized as the first quarter came to a close with the game tied at 17. I fast forwarded to the fourth quarter where the score was still back and forth and watched to my dismay as my team just kept turning the ball over with silly mistakes. With 17 seconds left and the game tied in overtime, I went for a steal and fouled one of their lesser players. Big oops, as he calmly stepped up and drained both free throws.

I received the ball on the inbounds pass and hustled it up the court picking up a well-placed screen from my long-time gym rat buddy, Mashon. I planted myself at the 3 point line and headfaked a shot, making my defender fly by me and leaving me with a relatively open but slightly off balanced 3 pointer from 21 feet out to win the game.

These days, I don’t have any favorite teams these days and it’s been a very long time since I felt my heart race in my chest like it was as I watched that shot float into the air on this grainy video a few weeks ago. The shot looked good as it left my hand and I was ready to jump into the air and pump my fist but instead…the ball hit the inside of the front of the rim, bounced into the back of the rim, hit the backboard, rolled like it was going to go in and then…nope, it rolled out. Game over. Ruidoso 57, Silver City 59. Ugh. The pain. I watched my 18 year-old self try to coolly walk over to the other team to shake their hand, but I knew that kid was in pain.

If I could go back in time and talk to that kid in the grainy video who was clearly the quickest, highest jumping, most experienced and best all around basketball player on the court that day, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and shaken him. Maybe even slapped him. Because he spent as much time trying to look cool on defense as he did making sure he was in the right position to help his teammates. And that he should have hustled even harder. And that he could have been smarter about how he approached that last few minutes of the game. And that it was okay that he missed the shot and that Silver City got the win again but that the only way to make sure the doesn’t happen next time is to practice even harder, longer and more.

I’m clearly going to analogize this to the stock market, you know, right? And here’s what the point is. That I need to give everything I’ve got to maximizing our gains and minimizing our risks over the long-term. We aren’t here to look cool, to brag about our picks that worked or to be a part of the Wall Street marketing machine that churns out mindless products and propagandizes itself as the solution to people’s wealth dreams.

Jim Cramer’s talked many times over the years about how you have to stay in the game. You can’t take risks that can blow up your chance to find the 10- or 100- baggers. You want to think about that right now while the markets are at all-time highs. You want to avoid being so heavily invested in any particular stock or sector or strategy that could end up leaving you on the sidelines. It’s okay to miss a shot or two because as long as you are still investing and analyzing and finding the new great Revolutionary stock pick, you’ll have the chance to make three pointers to win the game and keep your teammates (family) safe and happy.

A few other thoughts:

1) Amaris learned a lot in her therapy which challenges her body to find connections that will help her learn to sit up entirely on her own and eventually even walk, we hope. Family is what this game, this money, this life is all about.

2) Nobody knows who the real experts really are in crypto. I occasionally try to listen to a podcast or read an article or book about the crypto world and more often than not, I find myself picking apart the commentary and wondering who these people that are supposed to be experts really are. And don’t get me started on all the self-proclaimed economy experts out there.

2a) I prefer to take my medical advice from people who I love and trust and have known for most of my life and who went to many years of medical schools to become experts. Not the random folks on social media who barely passed high school chemistry but are now self-proclaimed experts on viruses, masks and vaccines.

3) I’m still waiting for several of my helium miners to be delivered — blame the chip shortage. I did take my existing helium hotspot/miner to Austin so we can see what the difference is between having it somewhere with hundreds of other hotspots vs out here where it was the only hotspot for hundreds of miles around. Helium’s crypto currency token, the HNT, has gone from $12 since I wrote about it in June to $26 today.

4) Chinese stocks bounced big today. I think there’s a lot of shorts that are covering today but there are few US people and/or institutions that are in them compared to just a month ago. I trimmed a little bit of my JD today but just a tiny bit. I’ve sold all of my MCHI. I’m holding most of my JD and my smallish TCEHY positions steady.

5) ABNB bounces big today too — not really sure why.

6) Infinity, INFI, has been on fire lately and hitting new highs today. I haven’t trimmed any yet, but I might look to trim just a little bit out of discipline soon as its run from $2.50 to $3.40 very quickly here in the last three weeks since we bought it.

I’ll be writing some Latest Positions updates this week so stay tuned for that. Also, we’ll do this week’s Live Q&A Chat at 2pm ET tomorrow (Wednesday). Join me in the TWC Chat Room or just email us your question to support@tradingwithcody.com.