It is very well known that the League of Legends community is one of the most toxic gaming communities worldwide despite how well-loved it is by everyone.

I had my fair share of experience of this toxicity having played this game for close to 7 years. The constant flaming and blaming amongst my teammates never fails to impress me every time.

I recently came to a sudden realisation that this is just how humans behave, and it is all too normal when everyone is anonymous in a casual online game. People show their true colours of how they behave when their identities are protected.

This has gave me some interesting insights in how this kind of human behaviour impacts the way we manage ourselves in the markets.

Real investors learn, not blame

In a typical game of League of Legends, or any other team-based games out there, we are matched up with others at random to compete against another team.

You can control every single action you make in the game, except the teammates you are put together with.

(Pardon this random photo I can't seem to delete it 😥)

The market works in a similar fashion. You can control everything except future events and unknown market forces.

Well, from experience, a good handful of people tend to put the blame on their teammates when the outlook of the game turns sour. That’s akin to blaming it on the aforementioned future events and unknown market forces that we have no control over.

It sounds absurd to do so when you are reading this, but this is what many people do when they face major losses in their portfolios. They find something to blame that they have no control over, when they only have themselves to blame for not putting in only what they can afford to lose.

The below article from npr.org is a good example of that.

We have to play the investing game right by understanding where went wrong and learn from our mistakes by learning how to manage risk instead of finding something out of our control to blame when things go south.

People who do this are simply shifting the blame from themselves, refusing to learn a lesson and diverting their anger elsewhere.

After all, experience is the best teacher. We can only learn from it when we realise that we are imperfect.

Don’t act on emotions, act on conviction

Ever left a game halfway because you got angry thinking your teammates are bad and the whole game is a flop?

It’s okay to admit you did, because it’s perfectly human to do that. We are simply evaluating the chances of success and acting accordingly to prevent ourselves from wasting more time on a seemingly losing battle.

However, that also decreases our winning rates with near-absolute certainty.

By leaving a game halfway, we are guaranteeing a loss unless our teammates become that ‘zai’ without us around.

In the same way, when we close our positions in a down market because of fear, we are guaranteeing our losses. This time with absolute certainty.

It’s fine if we are sure that closing your positions now will cut us losses after we have done our studying.

In fact, if we had already done our due diligence, we wouldn’t need to close our positions prematurely in the first place because of a very important word: conviction.

Conviction is what drives successful investors to their pots of gold. They have done their studying, and now all they have to do is to keep their money in the market. They close out their positions only when they know the company’s fundamentals has changed.

To build conviction, we have to adopt a growth mindset and seek to continuously learn. Knowledge and experience are synonymous with conviction because we can only hold our positions if we know what we are doing.

It is conviction that will bring us far enough to see whether we actually win or lose the game.

Summing up

There are many similarities between investing and playing a game. The key to doing well is to reduce our chances of losing by giving ourselves a chance to learn from mistakes and to not let our emotions control our actions by building conviction through continuous learning.

Spend more time learning about investing more than your game though unless you want to become a pro gamer ╰（‵□′）╯.