11.02.2006
To Market To Market To Buy a Fat Pig
I just ate my lunch and heard a radio discussion about investing. According to one of the Motley Fool guys, it turns out women have much more success on the stock market than men. Men invest with their emotions and trade for trade's sake. Women hold. Men think activity equals success.
Which made me think: does the same hold true for baseball? Unfortunately there are no women GMs to use as a reference point, but are certain GMs much less likely to make trades? There's Pat Gillick, so notoriously inactive he earned the nickname "Stand Pat." It's relevant to the Giants, as Brian Sabean has often invoked the "better to do nothing than make a bad trade" defense when the deadline has come and gone without a major move.
Of course, baseball has different parameters than the stock market. For all baseball teams, success is measured in discreet units called seasons. Investor "seasons" can last a day, a month, a quarter, a year, a decade...all defined by the investors' needs. Also, baseball players are free agents, sooner or later. The expiration date of their contracts forces GMs to consider trades differently than an investor wondering how long she should keep Microsoft. Only in very rare cases do investors feel they need to trade a stock or else get nothing for it; that happens in baseball all the time.
There's no grand point to this, as you probably figured out two paragraphs ago, just a few minutes of mid-day musing. I'll bet others have made some interesting parallels between baseball and stock trading; if you know of any, let us know.
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Which made me think: does the same hold true for baseball? Unfortunately there are no women GMs to use as a reference point, but are certain GMs much less likely to make trades? There's Pat Gillick, so notoriously inactive he earned the nickname "Stand Pat." It's relevant to the Giants, as Brian Sabean has often invoked the "better to do nothing than make a bad trade" defense when the deadline has come and gone without a major move.
Of course, baseball has different parameters than the stock market. For all baseball teams, success is measured in discreet units called seasons. Investor "seasons" can last a day, a month, a quarter, a year, a decade...all defined by the investors' needs. Also, baseball players are free agents, sooner or later. The expiration date of their contracts forces GMs to consider trades differently than an investor wondering how long she should keep Microsoft. Only in very rare cases do investors feel they need to trade a stock or else get nothing for it; that happens in baseball all the time.
There's no grand point to this, as you probably figured out two paragraphs ago, just a few minutes of mid-day musing. I'll bet others have made some interesting parallels between baseball and stock trading; if you know of any, let us know.
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