Mark yourself to market
My first boss gave me feedback once that one of my weaknesses was that I “marked myself to market” too often. What he meant, I think, was that I was too focused on measuring my performance, and that, in doing so, I was focused on the moment to moment volatility in a way that would interfere with seeing the big picture or pursuing major goals. I think the advice was well intentioned. 15 years on, I also think it was dead wrong.
All we get is a series of moments and who we are is the sum of those moments. Every moment you get a bit closer to your goal, that’s real. Every moment you get a bit further, that’s real too. Paying attention to the wiggles along the way doesn’t mean you can’t have long-term ambitions or that you should give up on them when they move a bit further into the distance. But you also shouldn’t ignore whether they’re getting further or closer.
I think about this in all sorts of settings, and oftentimes the places it leads me may seem silly or eccentric. For example, weight; I make sure I hit my target weight at least once a day. People have said to me (accurately) that a lot of the day to day volatility on what you weigh is just water weight. I always respond that they’re missing the bigger point - if you weigh the same amount for at least one second a day, you can’t gain weight. It just is what it is. Same goes for fitness, same for sleep, and diet. You hit the marks you want to hit every day and you’re locking in a certain level of performance. It may be a bit of an unforgiving or a demanding way to measure yourself, but it’s one that works.
Another objection is that sometimes you can’t keep pace anymore. I certainly am starting to feel that in my late 30s, especially around training, alcohol, and sleep. I’m already seeing that I need to be more mindful of these if I want to keep performance where I want it. And I mark myself all along the way. Doing so doesn’t mean inflexibility or foolish insistence on willing oneself to the impossible. I recently noticed on my sleep tracker my HRV crashing into high teens from its normal range of 50-80. (I’m a nervous sleeper/it’s never an awesome stat for me). So, I adapted my workout routine, going from the same level of impact every day to alternating higher impact and lower impact days to give my body enough chance to recover. This may not seem like a big deal, but it was a big change to my routine made quickly because I saw numbers I needed to respond to.
It’s probably unsurprising that I believe the same applies in spades to the actual markets. I believe the markets are a rough reflection of whether the world is getting better or worse each day, and we should listen. There’s no “one” market to watch - it makes sense to me to look across equities, breakeven inflation rates, government borrowing rates, etc. But I think, across the group of these, we get some kind of imperfect picture about whether we as a species made things a little bit better or worse as we ventured out into the world that day.
The converse works as well - if there’s a news story and I’m trying to figure out if it’s good, bad or indifferent, I’ll look to see what market movements were. It’s amazing how bad my predictions often are and how much information I get from the price action. While I understand (and am not insensitive) to the concerns about prediction markets, perpetual markets, etc., I do think there is real value there that is worth weighing in policy considerations around those markets. For the curious constituent, a new wealth of real-time information is available about the world around us.
So, pay attention to the real-time marks, in your life and in your world. It can be a bit exhausting, but it will at least keep you honest…