Marine Training for Investing Success

This blog post is by a group of investment professionals who also served in the Marine Corps. They say lessons they learned in Marine training have helped them in their investing and discuss them in detail.

The first three lessons all revolve around the theme of preventing overconfidence. Human beings are fundamentally prone to decision-making errors. In terms of finance, these biases can potentially create inefficient prices in the marketplace. So, lessons learned in the heat of combat also apply in the heat of fast-moving markets. We, as humans, are flawed, but we can overcome our deficiencies through systematic decision-making processes.

Underpinning all of these traits is integrity: do things right and do the right thing. Period. In the end, whether we are operating in a business environment or a military environment, integrity is everything.

Thankfully, the lessons learned in the military kept us alive and brought us home. Today, we continually discover that the “combat classroom” proves to be the best preparation for a deployment to Wall Street.