My partner is an idiot, so I have to explain everything through sports. What do you think the best sports metaphor is for investing? Wait, wait… it’s some dumb quote about running marathons, probably? Argh, I shouldn’t have asked….

Answer: Well, I’m obviously willing to liberally quote Warren Buffet, so I’ll point you to his Olympic High-Jump metaphor for how Berkshire Hathaway wants to approach investing: “"We look for 1-foot [high jump] bars to step over, rather than 7-foot or 8-foot bars to try and set some Olympic record by jumping over. And it's very nice, because you get paid just as well for the 1-foot bars.” For me, it’s a good reminder that I don’t need to have the “top score” in investing to “win”. (I mean someone bought into Bitcoin way before you even heard of it! Or they bought a bunch of NVIDIA stock 15 years ago because they were huge computer game graphics nerds!) Comparison is the thief of joy, so they say. And in investing, it might also be the thief of your portfolio, if you keep trying to replicate the “big wins” you hear about.

Now that you have mentioned marathons, however, I have to note that another metaphor for successful investing, of course, is that iconic New York Race: (nope, not the NYC marathon) the Fifth Avenue Mile. The race down Fifth Avenue is a great metaphor for investing. You start on 80th Street with a small rise just head of you, just enough elevation so that you can’t see the finish line. But when you are young and naive, of course, it looks easy: barely even a hill and not that long, “I’ll be over that in 3-4 blocks, before I even notice” you think. You are ready to charge off the starting line (or graduate)!. But when the race starts, you realize the top of that rise is maybe a little farther away than you thought. (“I thought my portfolio would be growing faster than this”, you wonder to yourself). Because now you are nearly sprinting, and breathing pretty hard, and the top of the hill doesn’t feel any closer. You keep checking your pace; glancing down at your wrist (or checking the markets). But then, if you remember your training mantra (your investment policy statement) - and because you know you have put in the training (or the savings), you can drop your head and power over the crest of the rise. Instead of looking at your watch, you look up and see 69th Street just ahead - aha! you are already half-way through. And though it doesn’t quite feel easy yet, you can just about start to feel the street rolling over into a gentle downhill (that’s the compounding growth) as you start to lengthen your stride. When you start to hear the crowds you know the finish line is right there in front of you. Before you even recognize it, you’ve accelerated a bit more, with even longer strides. In fact, you are practically bounding now, almost as if you are taking one massive leap (of your portfolio’s value) after another. It doesn’t even feel like you are in a race at all (and definitely not in the rat race). You are flying along; it’s a peaceful, traffic-free Fifth Avenue with the polite clapping of Central Park’s stately trees urging you along. Of course, yes, the bustle of NYC is still off to your left, those twin capitalist and consumerist thoroughfares of Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, but the roar you hear from them is now energizing you (or boosting your portfolio)! You start to think, “Wow, I am crushing this race (these gains are huge!) and, jeez, maybe we should get an apartment in the city after all? We’ve always loved the UWS near the park…” And by the time you reach the finish line you haven’t checked the pace on your watch in what feels like forever, but you look up at the clock and are almost in shock at how fast you’ve run (my god, that portfolio must be the nest egg of an ostrich). It dawns on you that all the work you put in before and at the start of the race have paid off big time, those early deposits compounded and grew until they took a life of their own, pulling you along faster and faster and upwards like Apollo’s chariot. At that point, you think back fondly to when you won the crown of fastest attorney at Sullivan and Cromwell. You know, have I told you that story…