Poker Skills Can Make Investing Less Like Gambling
A writer explores how playing cards taught her to discipline her thinking and focus more on process than outcomes.
Investment training.
Photographer: Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images
When “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis1was published in 2003, it quickly gained a big following on Wall Street. The book is ostensibly about baseball, but it’s really about how to seek out value in places others aren’t looking.
“There are all these biases that infect the human mind in making intuitive value judgments,” he said in one interview. The protagonist of “Moneyball,” Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, takes advantage of those biases by using a data-driven methodology to find good players that traditional baseball executives tend to overlook. As a result, the A’s have fielded competitive teams despite having far less money to spend on players than other franchises.