Snap Judgement

A bad play by your beloved football team and a bad day on the markets spark similar

emotions that can lead to irrational conclusions. One just has bigger consequences.

With college football arriving, let me suggest a way to fully engage your passions. Watch your team’s opener and note the first play of the season. A four-yard run. A first-down completion. A holding call. A fumble. Just thinking about it can trigger tension. Battered Aggie Syndrome—or “We’re Back!” Longhorn optimism—has you primed to make an irrational snap judgment.

Now imagine predicting the entire season from that one play and placing a $100,000 bet on it. Ten-yard gain and a first down? Excellent. Undefeated season, conference title, the whole hundred grand on a national championship. Keep the phone in your hand, because you must do it again after the second play. Turnover? Disaster. Switch the bet to a losing record, coach fired by Halloween, half the roster in the portal by Christmas. Repeat after every play for the entire season.

Nobody would do this. You would not do this. The emotion is real, but you know that one play in September contains almost no information about the fate of a season. Yet people do something remarkably similar in another high-stakes arena.

The one-play prediction

Big market swings impacting your retirement balance are common. An AI development, a policy headline, a Fed or Treasury announcement—and the market goes into an emotional spasm. Bloomberg and X get loud, predicting ruin or explosive gains. Adding to the pressure, your neighbor talks as though he saw it coming and played it perfectly.

A lot of people move money on those days. Some stop contributing. Some call their advisor to ask whether they should be doing something. That is like the one-play prediction, made during the first possession of a season with another twenty or thirty years to run.

If you are five years from retirement, you probably hold the largest balance you have ever had and have the fewest remaining earning years in which to replace a mistake. It is exactly the wrong moment to read the season off one snap—and worse, to change the game plan while your pulse is up.

This is harder than it used to be because the noise is louder. That is not your imagination. Just as NIL changed college football, markets have changed since many of us began funding retirement thirty years ago.

Who is running these plays?

When a stock moves 2% or 3% in an afternoon, we tend to imagine that thousands of thoughtful owners sat down, revalued the business, and reached a new long-term conclusion.

Sometimes new information really has changed the outlook. But prices are set at the margin by whoever is trading at that moment—and much of that trading has little to do with what a company might earn ten years from now. Consider a few of the participants.

The dealer. A market maker stands between buyers and sellers, earning a fraction of the spread and rapidly hedging the resulting exposure. The dealer is managing inventory and risk, not preparing a twenty-year forecast of the business.

The trader whose position expires this afternoon. In May 2025, options expiring that same day represented 61% of all S&P 500 Index options volume. Retail investors accounted for 54% of that same-day flow. The relevant horizon was 4:00 p.m., not years.

The systematic strategy. Some funds adjust exposure when volatility, leverage, momentum, or another predefined measure crosses a threshold. When markets become more volatile, certain strategies must sell. When conditions settle, they may buy again. These trades can reinforce a move without reflecting a new judgment about the underlying companies.

The index tracker. Some trades happen because an index changed its membership. When YETI entered the Russell 1000 in 2021, its volume jumped from roughly 1.3 million shares a day to 11 million. Of that day’s volume, 83.6% traded during or immediately after the closing auction. The orders were tied to index reconstitution, not a sudden nationwide reassessment of coolers.

And, of course, the investor. Someone who read the filings, studied the competitive position, formed a judgment about long-term value, and acted on it. That person is still out there.

The point is not that fundamentals no longer matter. Over time, they matter enormously. The point is that today’s price can be influenced by participants whose objectives, constraints, and time horizons have almost nothing in common with yours.

That is the amplifier. It makes sticking to a well-thought-out plan harder than it used to be.

I feel it myself, and I receive calls from clients when markets become volatile—whether prices are moving up or down. Yet very few long-term investors actually trade. Vanguard tracked nearly five million retirement-plan participants in 2025 and found that only 5% made a trade during the year. Ninety-five percent did nothing.

But surely somebody wins this game

The one-play prediction game attracts genuinely intelligent people. They are analytical, excellent at their actual jobs, and reasonably conclude that—with enough attention—they could become excellent at this one too. The record is unkind.

Researchers Fernando Chague, Rodrigo De-Losso, and Bruno Giovannetti followed 19,646 people who began day trading Brazilian index futures. They then studied the 1,551 who persisted for more than 300 trading days—the people who showed up almost every day for more than a year. Ninety-seven percent lost money. Just 1.1% earned more than Brazil’s minimum wage. The researchers found no evidence that traders improved with experience.

A certain personality type reads that result and assumes he belongs to the 3% who broke even. But the group that earned even a modest living was closer to one in a hundred.

And whom is he competing against? The people who are actually good at short-term trading do it for a living, at firms with research teams full of PhDs, specialized data, custom technology, and servers positioned to save microseconds. They have industrialized the guessing.

If you enjoy the thrill of playing a hunch, play it. There is a reasonable argument that scratching the itch in a small account can keep you from scratching it in the important one.

Just be clear about which money you are using. The money you move in a charged moment could mean losing the flexibility to fund Disney with the grandkids in 2030.

You do not have to take action if you already have

Some news is not just news, it genuinely matters. Inflation reaching forty-year highs while interest rates rose to confront it was not noise, and 2022 punished anyone who treated it that way. Artificial intelligence is not noise. Demographic change is not noise. Major policy shifts and serious geopolitical breaks can alter what a portfolio should own. All true.

But if you have built the portfolio properly, you have already taken action. You own many businesses, use multiple managers and strategies, maintain appropriate liquidity, and connect the allocation to the life it is supposed to fund.

You have also delegated adaptation to the people running the companies you own.

Amazon’s leadership must decide how much capital to commit to artificial intelligence. Exxon must navigate changes in energy supply and demand. Walmart must manage tariffs, technology, labor costs, and global supply chains. Thousands of people inside these organizations work on problems that an investor has encountered only as a headline.

They are imperfect, which is one reason to own many high-quality companies managed by well-incentivized people rather than betting everything on one or two. But they are at the wheel. Lurching to a conclusion after one piece of news and grabbing that wheel is unlikely to improve the outcome.

That dynamic explains much of the remarkable wealth-building record of American markets: We own adaptable enterprises staffed by people with the resources and incentives to confront change.

The better bet

Instead of reacting to exaggerated news feeds and short-term market moves, play the far more winnable long game. Suppose the contest was not to predict a season from one play, but to choose which college programs are likely to post winning records over the next ten years. I would include Alabama. Georgia. Ohio State. Notre Dame. Oregon. Even the Aggies—and, yes, reluctantly the Longhorns.

It would be a boring, slow-moving wager with a reasonably reliable payoff. Those programs have resources, coaching pipelines, recruiting advantages, facilities, and television money. They have bad Saturdays. They occasionally have bad years. Over a decade, they win far more often than they lose, and no single September play changes the proposition.

The long game in investing, however, is not merely a bet. It is asset ownership. That is what owning good companies means: not a prediction about Saturday, but a stake in an organization built to compete across many seasons, run by people paid to handle exactly the developments that frighten you.

What to do with this

Build confidence in your game plan now.

The next time markets have an ugly afternoon—or an ugly week—and your feed insists that you must do something, you should be able to recognize that it may be one play rather than the whole season. You should know how your allocation connects to your objectives. You should know the plan for volatility. You should know what you own and why you own it.

That preparation helps prevent self-destructive snap judgments. When genuine surprises arrive—and they will—you can breathe more easily knowing that the tactics, strategy, and, most importantly, the right people are already in place.

That said, if the Aggies do not light it up on their opening possession, I know I will struggle to maintain my confidence about 2026.

But I will not be logging on to a prediction market.