Baseball Made Me Tough. The Market Made Me Tougher.

Baseball isn’t for everyone. It demands skill, patience, preparation, and the ability to think through uncertain outcomes. And unless you’ve lived it, I understand why some people don’t quite get it.

I grew up in Miami in a community of Cuban immigrants — my parents, my grandparents, my friends, their families. That was my world in the 1980s and early ’90s.

Baseball wasn’t a hobby; it was the culture. Fields were always full. Kids played year-round. Spring ball, summer ball, fall ball, winter camps — there was always a place to lace up your cleats.

My parents never pushed me into it. They let me try everything. I’m the one who kept choosing baseball. Soccer felt boring, I was too young for football, and baseball was always there — waiting, teaching.

And looking back now, I learned things on those fields I still use every single day.

Next at Bat

In baseball, you can fail 70% of the time for your entire career and still end up in the Hall of Fame. A .300 batting average — getting a hit just three times out of 10 — makes you one of the best to ever do it.

The rest of the time? You’re striking out, popping up, grounding into double plays. All negative outcomes. All part of the game.

What matters isn’t the strikeout. It’s the next at bat.

A hitter can strike out in each of his first three plate appearances, look completely lost, and then come up in the ninth with two men on and drill a double into the gap to win the game.

Suddenly he’s the hero. No one cares about the earlier failures. One good swing erased them.

That’s the rhythm of the sport: fail, adjust, step back in.

Walk to the dugout, set your helmet down, peel off the batting gloves, spit some sunflower seeds, grab your glove, and go play defense until it’s your turn to bat again.

Then when you’re back in the box, wait for your pitch. Be patient. And if they float that big watermelon over the plate, take a big swing and try to knock it out of the park.

That’s the whole game.

And it’s the same in markets. You’re going to take losses — that’s the only guarantee. A few bad trades are just your strikeouts. What matters is how quickly you recognize them, move on, and get ready for the next pitch.

Because one great trade can erase a handful of small losses and put you — and your family or your investors — in the win column.

Preparing for an Unknown Future

One of the first things you learn playing defense in baseball is to plan before anything happens. Before every pitch, you run through the possibilities:

If it’s a ground ball, where am I throwing it?

If it’s a pop fly, who has priority?

If someone’s stealing, where’s the coverage?

You’re constantly asking, “If the ball comes to me right now, what’s my move?”

Baseball forces you to think through scenarios that may never happen. You don’t get that same pause-and-prepare rhythm in most other sports.

Baseball is a patient game — hundreds of pitches, each one requiring a plan, even though only a handful will ever involve you.

How many outs? Who’s on base? Is the hitter fast? Does he pull the ball? Does my double-play partner know I’m feeding him the throw? Did we communicate it?

Every pitch brings a decision tree you have to map out in advance.

It’s the exact same process in markets. We constantly prepare for outcomes we may never face.

Before every trade, we define what would invalidate our thesis. Not some arbitrary 5% stop. Not a random moving average.

We decide — in advance — the precise level or condition that tells us we’re wrong. And we do it before a single dollar is ever committed.

Maybe the market never gets there. Maybe the trade works immediately. But if the price does move against us, we already know the plan. No panic. No guessing. Just execution.

It’s the same as being a shortstop with a runner on first and one out:

Be ready to turn two if the ball finds you, and be just as ready to jog back to the dugout if they hit it to the left fielder instead.

And just like we predetermine our exits, we also predetermine our targets. Where we’re taking profits is mapped out from the start. No debating mid-at-bat, no improvising in the middle of a selloff.

Every trade has a plan before the pitch is even thrown.

Preparation. Anticipation. Decision-making before the action.

It’s baseball.

And it’s trading.

Toughen Up

You can find mental weakness everywhere — in business, in sports, in normal everyday life. But few environments drag human emotion to the surface the way the markets do.

People take things personally. They worry about what others think. They crumble under pressure. And it makes everything harder for them.

I’ve always said the world would be a much better — and mentally tougher — place if more people spent time in dugouts, locker rooms, and trading floors.

Those are the places that harden you. Those are the places that teach you how to take a punch and keep going.

The markets will kick your ass. Ask any great trader.

Baseball will humble you too — the best hitters fail 70% of the time.

You think mentally weak people can handle that?

And that’s before you even get to the culture around it: the locker-room ribbing, the dugout hazing, the trading-floor chaos. The name-calling. The initiations. The egos. The testosterone.

If you can survive that world — let alone thrive in it — everything else in life feels easier.

They once locked us freshman baseball players in a closet with a few gallons of beer and didn’t let us out until it was gone.

Years later, I had a computer thrown at me on a trading floor a block from the New York Stock Exchange. It hit me right in the face.

I made it. I laughed it off. And looking back, I realize those experiences shaped me. People who never went through anything like that? They’re just not as tough. And that’s not their fault — they never had to be.

I’m not saying you should go hunt down hazing rituals or hostile trading floors. But I am saying that if you want to build mental toughness, you need to put yourself in situations where comfort isn’t guaranteed.

Because here’s the thing: The older guys on the team may break your chops, but if anyone outside that team messes with you, they’re the first ones to jump in and defend you.

Same thing on the trading desks and in the old pits. They might scream at you all day, but everyone grabs beers together afterward like nothing happened.

It’s a rite of passage. And it’s how you learn not to be a wimp.

You don’t just wake up tough. You earn it.

Sports build that. Competition builds that. Pressure builds that.

And the market requires it.

If you don’t have the mental toughness, you will lose all your money.

Good.

That’s exactly how it should be.

And you should want it that way too.