On July 31st, in the 8th inning of a tight game against the Mets, Joey Votto stepped to the plate. The game was on the line along with one of the most remarkable streaks of Votto’s Hall of Fame-worthy career—he had homered in seven straight games, one away from tying the longest streak in MLB history. (Even more impressive, the 37-year-old Votto had nine homers in these seven games.) Despite being in enemy territory in New York, the fans chanted Votto’s name, hoping to witness baseball history.

In the second pitch of the at-bat, Employee #19 got a thigh-high pitch and absolutely unloaded. Advanced stats measured the ball’s velocity off his bat at 109.4-mph. The ball was a line-drive, rocketing towards the seats until it smashed against the orange line at the very top of the wall. Just a few inches higher, it would have cleared the edge of the wall, and Votto would have made history. Instead, he settled for a single. (The Reds went on to lose the games in extra-innings after a bullpen meltdown, which is all too commonplace.)

After the game, when asked about how difficult it was for the streak to come to an end when it was so close to continuing, Votto replied, “that’s baseball, man.”

Votto then considered the streak’s bookends, saying that it started with “a 98-mph weak fly ball that carried into the first couple of rows into Cincinnati, and it ended on a 109, 110-mph line drive off the wall. And that’s baseball.”

That’s investing, too.

Given the choice, Joey Votto would rather hit the ball 110-mph than 98-mph every single time. But occasionally, a weak fly ball hit off the end of the bat will result in a home run, while a smashed line drive will end up a single, or worse, an out.

Same with investing. 

We know that there are ways to tip the odds in your favor when it comes to investing:

• Prudently diversifying your assets is known as the only “free lunch” in the industry.
• Keeping expenses and taxes as low as possible will let you keep more of your return.
• Having a thoughtfully developed investment plan, and the discipline to stick to it, will always beat a strategy based on whimsy and gut feelings over the long run. 

The tricky thing is, sometimes you can do all these things and still end up losing money over the course of a year.

Sometimes, you’ll get unlucky timing and invest a chunk of money right before a stock market correction.

That’s investing, man.

Even worse, sometimes your dopey friend from college will #YOLO his life savings into some no-name stock that he read about on Reddit and make a killing. (Easier said than done.)

That’s investing, man.

It hurts when you do all the “right” things and still feel like you lost.

There are two ways that I know of to cope with that feeling.

First, try to ignore your friend. His finances are irrelevant to yours. But jealously and ego are innate in humans, so this is harder said than done. This timeless parable is FOMO at its finest. 

The second source of solace comes from knowing that successful investing isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Author Morgan Housel says that “good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one-off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with, which can be repeated for the longest period of time.”

Building on Housel’s point, good investing is about using probabilities to make intelligent decisions, knowing that those decisions won’t pan out every single time.

That’s why it makes sense to diversify, even though any individual stock has the potential to explode higher in a single day or week—because anything that can gain 50% in a week could just as quickly lose 50%, too. Concentrating your wealth in one or just a few stocks is a strategy more likely to underperform a diversified portfolio over time.

It’s also why most retirees should own bonds, even though they drag on performance more often than not. During the occasional (but inevitable!) stock market crash, bonds stabilize the portfolio, limiting the damage until stocks recover.

Finally, it’s why a plain, low-cost, index-tracking fund usually outperforms high-cost, actively managed funds that try to beat the market. Sure, the active funds will win on occasion. But the only guarantee in investing is the fees you’re paying. And over time, actively managed funds struggle to overcome their higher costs.

Hitting the ball hard is key to consistent, long-term success in baseball.

Diversifying, keeping costs low, and having patience are keys to long-term success in investing.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. 

When crazy sh!t happens like a weakly-hit fly ball going for a fluky homer or GameStop shares exploding for 1,000% gain, try to avoid the distraction and stick to what works. As sportswriter Hugh Keough said, “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”

Disclaimer: Truepoint Wealth Counsel is a fee-only Registered Investment Adviser (RIA). Registration as an adviser does not connote a specific level of skill or training. More detail, including forms ADV Part 2A & Form CRS filed with the SEC, can be found at TruepointWealth.com. Neither the information, nor any opinion expressed, is to be construed as personalized investment, tax or legal advice.