The Hardest Thing in Martial Arts and Investing Is the Same Thing.

I have been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for most of my adult life. I earned my black belt the way everyone does – by showing up, getting submitted, getting back up, and doing it again for years. There is no shortcut. There is no clever hack that bypasses the time on the mat.

I have also spent over a decade in institutional finance, building and managing portfolios at PIMCO, Deutsche Bank, UBS, RBC, and a $50B RIA. And after all of it – the mats and the markets – I am convinced that the single hardest skill in both disciplines is exactly the same.

It is not technique, or intelligence, or even experience.

It is patience under pressure.

What the Mat Teaches You

In BJJ, there is a concept called "surviving bad positions." When you are on the bottom – when someone bigger, stronger, and more experienced has you pinned and is working toward a finish – every instinct in your body tells you to panic. To explode. To do something, anything, to get out of this uncomfortable situation right now.

The beginners always listen to that instinct. They burn energy, create openings for their opponent, and usually end up in a worse position than when they started. The advanced practitioners do the opposite. They breathe. They defend. They wait. They trust that if they stay calm and survive long enough, an opportunity will come.

It always does.

What the Markets Teach You

Markets work the same way. Every correction, every drawdown, every stretch of underperformance is a bad position. It is uncomfortable. It feels urgent. Every instinct says to do something – sell, rotate, hedge, change the plan.

And almost every time, the investors who act on that instinct end up worse off than the ones who breathed, held their position, and trusted the process. The data on this is not subtle. The average investor dramatically underperforms the funds they are invested in because they buy after things go up and sell after they go down. Patience is not a personality type. It is an edge.

I have seen this at every level of the industry. Sophisticated institutional investors, individual clients, traders with twenty years of experience. When the pressure is on, the pull toward action is overwhelming. Resisting it is the hardest thing in the room.

The Skill Worth Building

The good news is that patience is trainable. On the mat, you build it by deliberately putting yourself in uncomfortable positions and practicing staying calm. In markets, you build it by having a plan you trust deeply enough that volatility does not feel like a verdict.

That is one of the things I try to give every client at STQ. Not just a portfolio, but a framework for understanding why the portfolio is constructed the way it is – so that when a bad position comes, and it will, the instinct to panic has somewhere rational to land.

The technique matters. The tax strategy matters. The asset location matters. But none of it compounds if you cannot stay in the position long enough to let it work.