Doing Nothing Is The Skill | 11 Jul 2026 morning

Watched a penalty shootout with a friend who runs money for a living. Keeper guessed left, the ball rolled straight down the middle, net rippling in the exact spot he had just left. My friend groaned like it was his own capital.

So I showed him the study. Someone sat down with 286 top flight penalties and worked out where keepers should actually stand. The best move is to not move. Hold the center and you save about a third of them. Dive left or right and you save roughly one in eight. Standing still wins by a mile.

Keepers dive 94 percent of the time anyway.

Here is the reason. A goal you concede while planted in the center feels like you fell asleep on the job. A goal you concede mid dive feels like you at least tried. Same goal, same scoreline, completely different shame. And the brain will pay real money to avoid looking like it did nothing.

That is action bias. Your portfolio runs it in a crash.

Put it in rupees. Ten lakh in a fund, ten thousand units, market falls 30 percent. The investor who sat still kept all ten thousand units and rode the recovery back to twelve lakh. The one who could not just watch sold near the bottom, waited until it felt safe, and bought back in higher. The same money now buys seven thousand units. He ends at eight lakh forty thousand.

The three thousand units he lost were not taken by the crash. They were the fee for needing to do something.

In a fall the only honest question is not what should I do. It is whether anything actually changed the plan you wrote when the market was calm. Usually nothing did.

The catch is you can only sit still through a drawdown you were built for. Worth knowing that number before you are standing in one: