When I woke up this morning, I saw that Dak Prescott, the star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, signed a new contract, making him the highest-paid player in NFL history. His new four-year, $240 million deal makes him the league’s first $60 million per year player.
If you are curious, here is a list of the highest-paid NFL players in 2024.
Each of the 32 teams has an active roster of 53 players. That is 1,696 active roster players. Add the practice squad and account for injuries, and in a typical season, you end up with about 2,100 players per season.
Now that the NFL Football season is officially underway, I thought it would be interesting to look at each position’s composite player.
As you might expect, different sports have a different ratio of ethnicities, builds, and features. The same is true for different positions on a football team. For example, you might expect more Pacific Islanders in Rugby or Asians in Badminton. You expect NBA players to be taller, swimmers to have longer arms, and football players to have more muscle.
Here is a visualization that shows what happens when you average the top players’ faces in various positions.
Composites are interesting.
While you may be thinking, “This player must be unstoppable,”... statistically, he’s average.
The “composite” NFL player would be the 848th-best player in the league. He’s not a starter, and he plays on an average team.
We found the same thing with our trading bots. The ones that made it through most filters weren’t star performers. They were the average bots that did enough not to fail (but failed to make the list as top performers in any of the categories). The survivors were generalists, not specialists.
In reality, you need both.
In an ideal world with no roster limits, you’d want the perfect lineup for each granular situation. You’d want to evaluate players on how they perform under pressure, on different downs, against other players, and with various schemes.
On a related but slightly different note, I recently read a post called “Why Generalists Own the Future.” It says that, in the age of AI, it’s better to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little. But part of that rationale is that it is easy to find or create digital specialists to do the things people used to do.
That’s what technology lets you do with algorithms. You can have a library of systems that communicate with each other ... and you don’t even have to pay their salary (but you will need data scientists, researchers, machines, data, alternative data, electricity, disaster recovery, and a testing platform).
You won’t find exceptional specialists if your focus is on generalized safety. Generalists are great, but you also have to be able to respond to specific conditions.
An Antidote For Anxiety & Scary Times
People seem rattled right now, don’t they?
Wallets have been tight, and fears of a recession have run rampant.
Even though markets and the economy are not the same thing, many voters believe they are. Consequently, in an election year, I suspect the government will push every button and pull every lever to boost the market leading into November.
Speaking of the markets, they have been pretty volatile the last few weeks. They have posted some of their worst days since COVID-19 but some of the best, too.
We find ourselves in a particularly partisan election year, with lots of uncertainty about who is running, what they stand for, and whether they can make a difference – or even do the job.
The situation feels worse because scary geopolitical events (that threaten World War 3) punctuate seemingly endless negative news cycles.
Now, on to the real point ... those things don’t matter and shouldn’t steal your focus. Why? Because that’s the playing field we all have to navigate.
There will be winners and losers. The key distinction lies in whether you choose to focus on opportunities or risk.
So, I thought this would be an excellent time to revisit how to cope with losses and manage your anxieties in “scary times.”
The Anxiety Antidote
During scary times, many people suffer from “I should have ...”, or “if I would have ...”, or “if I could have ...” thoughts.
The problem is that thoughts like those create more stress and distraction.
I’m reminded of a quote.
Negative focus highlights loss, difficulties, past events, missing things, and what you don’t want.
Think of them as an unhealthy reflex that wastes energy, confidence, and time.
All We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself
I often talk about market psychology and human nature. The reason is that markets reflect the collective fear and greed of their participants... people tend to get paralyzed during scary times like these.
But it’s not the economy that makes people feel paralyzed. People feel paralyzed because of their reactions and their beliefs about the economy. Your perception becomes your reality.
A little examination reveals that most fear is based on a “general” trigger rather than a “specific” trigger. In other words, people are afraid of all the things that could happen and are paralyzed by the sheer scope of possibilities. These things don’t even have to be probabilities to scare them.
You gain a competitive advantage as soon as you recognize that it’s not logical. Why? Because as soon as you distinguish that fear as not necessarily true, you can refocus your insights and energy on moving forward. You can act instead of react. You make better decisions when you come from a place of calm instead of fear... so create that calm.
Even a tough environment like this presents you with opportunities if you watch for them ... or even better ... if you create them.
The Scary Times Success Manual
The goal is to move forward and feel better.
Strategic Coach offers ten strategies for transforming negativity and unpredictability into opportunities for growth, progress, and achievement. They call it the “Scary Times Success Manual,” and what follows are some excerpts:
Forget about your difficulties, focus on your progress.
Because of some changes, things may not be as easy as they once were. New difficulties can either defeat you or reveal new strengths. Your body’s muscles always get stronger from working against resistance. The same is true for the “muscles” in your mind, spirit, and character. Treat this period of challenge as a time when you can make your greatest progress as a human being.
Forget about events, focus on your responses.
When things are going well, many people think they are in control of events. That’s why they feel so defeated and depressed when things turn bad. They think they’ve lost some fundamental ability. The most consistently successful people in the world know they can’t control events - but continually work toward greater control over their creative responses to events. Any period when things are uncertain is an excellent time to focus all of your attention and energy on being creatively responsive to all the unpredictable events that lie ahead.
Forget about what’s missing, focus on what’s available.
When things change for the worse, many desirable resources are inevitably missing - including information, knowledge, tools, systems, personnel, and capabilities. These deficiencies can paralyze many people, who believe they can’t make decisions and take action. A strategic response is to take advantage of every resource that is immediately available to achieve as many small results and make as much daily progress as possible. Work with every resource and opportunity, and your confidence will continually grow.
Forget about your complaints, focus on your gratitude.
When times get tough, everyone must make a fundamental decision: complain or be grateful. In an environment where negative sentiment is rampant, the consequences of this decision are much greater. Complaining only attracts negative thoughts and people. Gratitude, on the other hand, creates the opportunity for the best thinking, actions, and results to emerge. Focus on everything you are grateful for, communicate this, and open yourself to the best possible consequences.
Final Thoughts
We can pontificate all day long on the short-term causes of the rises and falls of markets, but I don’t think it does much good. I let the algorithms worry about those. It’s the larger trends we have to be personally aware of.
I sound like a broken record, but volatility is the new normal.
Pair that with all the fear and uncertainty, and you’ve got a recipe for increased volatility and noise. That means that the dynamic range of a move will be wider and happen in a shorter period of time than ever before. You’ll hear me echo this thought over the next few years as the ranges continue to expand and compress. Cycles that used to play out over weeks now take days or hours. The game is still the same; it just takes a slightly different set of skills to recognize where the risks and opportunities are.
Today’s paradigm - both in life and trading - is about noise reduction. It’s about figuring out what moves the needle and focusing only on that.
The crucial distinction is between adding data and adding information. Adding more data does not equal adding more information. In fact, blindly adding data increases your chances of misinformation and spurious correlations.
My final comment is that there’s a difference between investing and trading, and while humans can invest, if you’re “personally” still trying to trade - you’re likely playing a losing game. If you don’t know what your edge is, you don’t have one.
If you’re investing, I’ll advise you to act like a robot. If you removed human fear and greed from your decision-making - what would you do?
Keep calm and carry on.
Posted at 09:21 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Healthy Lifestyle, Ideas, Market Commentary, Personal Development, Pictures, Religion, Science, Television, Trading, Trading Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)
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