I recently chanced upon some Youtube videos on the Spain and Barcelona football star, Rodrigo Hernández Cascante or Rodri which is a more familiar name among football fans. He was a pivotal player in Spain’s journey towards winning the world cup and was voted the most valuable player of the world cup. It was an extraordinary journey as he only just recovered from a serious injury suffered in September 2024.
The video was pretty interesting as it highlighted the importance of Rodri’s role to his team. He wasn’t a flashy player who scores 30 yard screamers or dribbles past 3 or 4 players. Neither was he particularly fast or physically imposing. Sometimes during the full match, you might even ask what on earth is Rodri doing to deserve the Ballon D'Or (the award for being the best male football player) in 2024. It’s true he is almost never mentioned in the same breadth as the most recognized football stars on the planet like Yamine Lamal, Mbappe or Erling Haaland but he has one outstanding attribute which is highly important, his football intelligence. His elite spatial awareness and technical ability in tight spaces when pressed makes him an extremely important player to the team’s tactical structure.
There is a saying from the legendary Dutch player, Johan Cryuff: “Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.” Which I thought epitomizes what Rodri is best at, he does the “simple” things extremely well and uses his intelligence to read the game and orchestrate the team’s play from central midfield.
I see alot of similarities between football and investing. Investing can be very simple but keeping your investment strategy simple is anything but. Nowadays there are so much investment “advice” in social media that it is simply mind boggling. Its either a buy call on X stock before it skyrocket or some prophet of doom saying the stock market will be crashing soon. There is so much stimuli that filtering out all the noise and making sound judgement calls can be quite a challenging task. When the market skyrockets or crashes, we also need to control our emotions from making irrational decisions which is not an easy feat as well.
I have been buying individual stocks and etfs and the performance has underwhelmed the strategy of just sticking to a single broad based low cost etf. I believe I have over-complicated my investment strategy and my goal in the upcoming months is to trim my holdings gradually and just park my cash into a low cost etf. It’s also becoming increasingly noisier in the market recently with all the doom and gloom that AI would eventually destroy humanity and all these head line grabbing news. First we have news on AI bubble bursting and bringing down the whole financial market, now AI is coming to destroy us. Maybe I should learn from Rodri, keep calm under pressure, think logically and dont over complicate stuff. But easier said than done and I certainly still have a long way to go in my investment journey.
