Darwin Nunez and missed chances

There is one “fact” I’m rather proud of – it is highly likely (there is absolutely no way to verify) that in CAT 2003-4 (scheduled for 2003; then paper got leaked and it was held in Feb 2004), among all those who actually joined IIMs that year, I had the most number of wrong answers.

By my calculations after the exam (yeah I remember these things) I had got 20 answers wrong (in a 150 question paper). Most of my friends had their wrong counts in the single digits. That I did rather well in the exam despite getting so many answers wrong was down to one thing – I got a very large number of answers right.

Most readers of this blog will know that I can be a bit narcissist. So when I see or read something, I immediately correlate it to my own life. Recently I was watching this video on striker Darwin Nunez, and his struggles to settle into the English Premier League.

“Nobody has missed more clear chances this season than Darwin Nunez”, begins JJ Bull in this otherwise nice analysis. Somewhere in the middle of this video, he slips in that Nunez has missed so many chances because he has created so many more of them in the first place – by being in the right place at the right time.

Long ago when I used to be a regular quizzer (nowadays I’m rather irregular), in finals I wouldn’t get stressed if our team missed a lot of questions (either with other teams answering before us, or getting something narrowly wrong). That we came so close to getting the points, I would reason, meant that we had our processes right in the first place, and sooner or later we would start getting those points.

In general I like Nunez. Maybe because he’s rather unpredictable (“Chaos” as JJ Bull calls him in the above video), I identify with him more than some of the more predictable characters in the team (it’s another matter that this whole season has been a disaster for Liverpool -I knew it on the opening day when Virgil Van Dijk gave away a clumsy penalty to Fulham). He is clumsy, misses seemingly easy chances, but creates some impossible stuff out of nothing (in that sense, he is very similar to Mo Salah, so I don’t know how they together work out as a portfolio for Liverpool. That said, I love watching them play together).

In the world of finance, losing money is seen as a positive bullet point. If you have lost more money, it is a bigger status symbol. In most cases, that you lost so much money means that your bank had trusted you with that much money in the first place, and so there must be something right about you.

You see this in the startup world. Someone’s startup folds. Some get acquihired. And then a few months later, you find that they are back in the market and investors are showering them with funds. One thing is that investors trust that other investors had trusted these founders with much more money in the past. The other, of course, is the hope that this time they would have learnt from the mistakes.

Fundamentally, though, the connecting thread running across all this is about how to evaluate risk, and luck. Conditional on your bank trusting you with a large trading account, one bad trading loss is more likely to be bad luck than your incompetence. And so other banks quickly hire you and trust you with their money.

That you have missed 15 big chances in half a season means that you have managed to create so many more chances (as part of a struggling team). And that actually makes you a good footballer (though vanilla pundits don’t see it that way).

So trust the process. And keep at it. As long as you are in the right place at the right time a lot of times, you will cash on average.