Women's Money Wisdom

Episode 242: Investor Lessons from 2024 Detroit Tigers Playoff Run

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 242

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What if resilience and strategic thinking could turn the impossible into reality? In this episode, Melissa Joy, CFP®, CDFA® takes us on an inspiring journey through the Detroit Tigers’ rollercoaster 2024 season. With a 0.2% playoff chance at one point, the Tigers made a stunning comeback under the expert leadership of manager AJ Hinch. But this story goes beyond the world of sports—Melissa draws meaningful connections between the Tigers’ success and essential financial principles that can help you in your personal financial journey. 

We explore how perseverance, teamwork, and adaptability played a crucial role in the Tigers’ turnaround and how those same traits can power your financial planning. By embracing probabilities over certainties, this episode offers insights on how to approach challenges—whether on the field or in life—with a mindset geared toward progress and success. 

Listen and Learn: 

  • The Tigers’ astonishing 2024 season comeback and what it teaches about resilience. 
  • How manager AJ Hinch’s strategic leadership mirrors the role of a financial advisor. 
  • Why embracing probabilities instead of certainties can revolutionize your financial planning, especially in times of economic uncertainty. 
  • The parallels between sports perseverance and building a financial plan that endures setbacks. 
  • Strategies for staying positive and maintaining a long-term perspective during financial challenges. 

The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only. No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https://stephenPearl Planning.com/

Melissa Joy:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast.

Melissa Joy:

I thought I'd do something different today and I wanted to talk a little bit about a story ripped from the headlines, so to speak. I live in Michigan, as many of you know, and that's where our company is located, pearl Planning A little fact that I'm sure we bring up from time to time. But our tagline at Pearl Planning is no grit, no pearl. We love that. One of our clients in our early days brought up how a pearl is really about grit. A pearl is an irritation that turns into something beautiful, and we've really embraced that with our tagline, and so do many teams in Detroit, which is a neighbor of ours, just about 45 minutes away, and this fall there was the very special sports story about the Detroit Tigers, and if you've listened to the podcast over the weeks and months. You know that I'm a sports fan. I'd say baseball is probably lower on my list, but certainly it's really special when you get to the postseason in baseball, especially when your hometown team is making moves and making a run.

Melissa Joy:

And the Detroit Tigers team was just a team of myth. Very unusual because they entered the 2024 season with very low expectations. Their rebuilding team hadn't been to the playoffs in nine seasons, which is a longest streak right now in the MLB, and a young team, very low payroll. And then they suffered injuries during the season, at which point ownership kind of threw in the towel and traded away one of the best remaining pitchers on the team, so it trade-deadlined at the end of July. This was a team that didn't have much going for them. In fact they had lost five more games than they had won and for all intents and purposes they should have just either thrown in the towel or said you know, let's chalk it up and get some experience in these last couple months, but not a lot to play for. And of course I wouldn't be wearing the sweatshirt in mid-October as we're recording this episode if something special hadn't happened from that turning point.

Melissa Joy:

And so team manager AJ Hinch, who had experience in the past in very successful teams, brought the team together in a team meeting and said you know we're going to change it up, we're going to deal with what we've got. You know we only have we can't change the circumstances, but we can change the results. At least that's what he asked the team to believe. And the team rallied. They really took it one day at a time and started to put together some really impressive wins. They did it in an unorthodox manner, so the team did not have a full roster of reliable starting pitchers inning at a time on the defensive side of the field, because they weren't filled with major league sluggers who just had unstoppable batting averages. They really worked hard and improved their fielding and they were dealing with players that didn't necessarily have a ton of experience when it came to the major leagues and a lot of people were being pulled up from minor league teams and, you know, maybe weren't even tearing it up in the minors and somehow magically, creatively, they pulled together teamwork and belief in themselves that resulted in an epic, you know, kind of second half comeback or really second last third comeback, I should say. That allowed them to surge into the post-season.

Melissa Joy:

So this was a very special special season and I love we can reflect back on past episodes. I love pulling you know stories from pop culture, whether it's the Olympics or a movie. We'll put some old episodes into the show notes so you can reflect back yourself, and I love pulling them together to talk about financial planning and investment lessons, because I just think it's a way to relate this technical, sometimes intimidating part of our lives to everyday life, and so I wanted to do that today with the Detroit Tigers. It was a remarkable journey. I got the opportunity to go to the first home playoff game that the Tigers had hosted in a long, long time this week, as we're recording, recording October 14. So the week before, on a Wednesday, there was a really great win in their series against the Cleveland Guardians, and unfortunately the team didn't make it past that ALDS series, but they certainly were one for the record books nonetheless and a lot to build on for future years.

Melissa Joy:

Now, when I just thought I have to do this episode, the number one thing for me I'm going to talk to you about it right now, beyond the other five lessons that I'm going to include for you, is talking about probability of success and thinking in the world, not in black and white predictions, but in probabilities. And so there's a really cool chart that goes over the odds for making the playoffs, fangraphs does odds that are published for making the playoffs, and, as of August 10th, the odds of the Tigers making the playoffs were 0.2%, and, if you can imagine, this kind of stuff just does not happen very often. Those weren't bad odds. Those were like truly the way it should have been reported at the time, and yet, as of September 27th, they were able to clinch a spot in the playoffs and the Tigers really had two games left to go, which, if you think about how narrowly they made the playoffs, that's incredible If you think about how quickly they turned their season around. To put it into perspective, you have to go back to 1973 to find a team that rallied from at least eight games under 500 in August in order to make the postseason, and that team was the New York Mets. But that is way back in history, more than 50 years ago, and so this type of thing does not happen very often.

Melissa Joy:

I would not suggest that you go to the casino and put money on something with 0.2% odds, but certainly you're going to get a high payday if you do that. That is not the type of investing we like to do. But I love dealing and thinking about the world in terms of probability. It's so easy to say you know, this wasn't our year black and white, we're not going to the playoffs and you know, I wouldn't judge you if you said that, if there were 25% odds or even a little bit higher than that. But that's just not the way that the world works and you can think about that.

Melissa Joy:

Whether it comes to retirement planning, where we often or typically talk to you about your probability of success in retirement and tell you, if we're working on that, that you need the flexibility in your plan where, if something goes wrong, that could be a really big deal. Your plan is solid enough that you can make adjustments and not have to kind of throw in the towel. But I also you know all the time think about probability. For example, what are the odds that this year is an up or down market? Well, it's actually very unpredictable to know whether things are going to be going up and down in any given year, in any given week. If you're thinking day to day about where's the market going to be, it's closer to that coin toss. It's like 50-50 from day to day, whether the market is up or down, and you really need longer periods of time, you need years or five-year periods or 10-year periods to get more accurate kind of probability of where returns may be, whether they're up or down, when you think about stock market returns. And so I really try to train myself, as I'm thinking about investing, not to be glass totally full or glass totally empty and really think more in terms of probability Helpful too.

Melissa Joy:

For example, for most of the last two or three years or even beyond that, people have been uh sure that our country was going into a recession. We had some lower growth numbers, um, but they were not accompanied by a high unemployment, um, and so it's really been this. You know kind of drumbeat of the recession is here, the recession is coming, we're going to have it, we're in the first quarter, et cetera, and when you really look at the statistics, it just hasn't happened yet. And you know that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. But it's all about probability when I think of is it a recession possible? And a recession is always possible. It's unpredictable in many cases. Same goes for a bear market, but there's always that possibility.

Melissa Joy:

And working in a world where you understand and think in statistical probabilities instead of in a prediction mode, which our brain is inherently like, you know, just even going back to the way we were wired from our ancestors, the so-to-speak cavemen you know we really, really want to have that predictability and certainty to know what is going to be happening. It makes us feel much more comfortable, even if it's bad news, and so it really takes some mental gymnastics to work on you thinking about the world in terms of probability, and so I encourage you to have that mindset and to take a step back when you're trying to say, oh gosh, the sky is falling because this happened or that happened. And you know, gosh, there's so many opportunities to think that way in an election year and, frankly, in any given year, there's so many reasons to be pessimistic or negative that I encourage you to then take a step back and say, no, let's focus on statistics and probability, not on predictions, and let's not try to kind of latch onto a crystal ball that may make us feel more comfortable but may distract us from the best process or or the best results. So let's, let's move on to you know, after we think about that importance of probability, I would say if I had, you know, teleported back to the locker room when AJ Hinch was talking to his team, I would say that he was asking his team to believe in themselves in spite of the odds. And certainly I find that one of the things that is really important for me in terms of perspective with my client conversations and our conversations with you here in the podcast, is to be thinking about things without a doomsday, you know, kind of rain cloud over our heads. And so I don't think that this Tigers team would have entered the last eight weeks of their season with the possibilities of success unless they had really believed in a glass half full result. Now, that didn't necessarily have to be that they would have made the playoffs.

Melissa Joy:

Even though they did, I think they probably had to adapt a mindset that was very flexible, that was very resilient, that did not feel defeated, even though they certainly you know, there's no baseball team that just wins every game but they really adopted a glass half full mindset that believed that, whether they were able to pull off what turned out to be a miracle, or if they were just using that the time between the mid season and end of season as a building block for the next year, as a way to get experience, because so few of the team members had had the opportunity for experience and past relative to their opponents. That, um, they adopted a mindset that was both positive and had adaptability and resilience. And, as I told you earlier in this um episode, you if I just pick any day of the week, it's about a coin toss as to whether you'll be a winner or a loser when it comes to the broad diversified stock market and you really need to go out in any given year. It's about a 7 out of 10 chance. But gosh, I'd say 7 out of 10 or batting 700 would be pretty darn good when it comes to baseball or the world of investing. And you need to keep that mindset that you know you, you really are working with a process when it comes to investing in financial decisions, to know that there are going to be bad days and to kind of live to fight another day when it comes to investing.

Melissa Joy:

The first thing I would keep in mind after you've adopted that probability versus need for certainty mindset, is to be adaptable and resilient. Sometimes you need that adaptability because something in your life changes. You don't have the same financial deck and maybe the deck is stacked against you. There's a change in job, there's a change in health circumstances, et cetera. Sometimes you need that adaptability because the world around you changes. Whether in the news in 2024, we've had stories of major weather events. When you think about people's lives, it could be something where there's a recession in general, like I described, or certainly we've learned lessons from COVID or the housing market in the past, and so adapting a mindset that is able to change and also is able to realize that setbacks don't mean they're the end of the story, they're just a part of the journey really becomes important.

Melissa Joy:

The second lesson I would encourage people to take in is a long-term mindset. Now, in the case of this example, every game really mattered and it was important for the team to put together a record that they hadn't been able to put together in recent history, and they really needed to think about not just winning and, like you know, every at bat being a home run but they just needed to win each at bat. They needed to play defensively in a way that kept them in the game. They needed to do different things when it came to the bullpen because they were so limited in terms of their regular rotation and in the world of investing, we have longer than one baseball season to work with. Same goes for the Tigers. I hope that they're able to build and also that their ownership is able to choose to invest more in a team that was really under-resourced relative to some of their more well-funded peers with bigger payrolls, et cetera.

Melissa Joy:

But it's really important to think about the long-term and not overcompensate for any given period of time. So one example this year because we have a presidential election year is one of my mantras is that your investment portfolio's timeframe is not the same as the presidential election cycle, and I just think it's so important to think about building on your success and also to think about your process. Do things the right way from day to day, from month to month, when it comes to making good financial choices, saving some of the money that you make spending reasonably. Be a disciplined investor that maintains diversification and really looks for the opportunities to do the right things when it comes to investing, so that you can be building over time and enjoying the benefits of long-term returns. So that's something I think it's really important to keep in mind.

Melissa Joy:

The third important lesson that I can talk about day in and day out, when it comes to both investing as well as your financial plan, is the benefits of teamwork and diversification. So this certainly was not a team full of stars, but the team built off of each other. They really supported each other. You could hear that in interviews, as teammates talked about their success and that they were playing for each other. The fielders and batters talked about how much the pitchers were keeping them in the games and the pitchers said they were doing it all for the team taking Sco, taking Scooble, the star pitcher for an example. But really this is a great example that every single person on the team, every pinch hitter, every batter, every fielder, even if their bats weren't hot, were really trying to bring the team success.

Melissa Joy:

And when it comes to investing, your overall strategy has to have, in my opinion, in most cases, for a reasonable outcome of success or possibility of success, you really need diversification. Now we use a wonky term called asset allocation when we talk about that diversification, but that's just saying you can't just load up on, using the baseball analogy, you can't just load up on sluggers, because you're going to need somebody to play defense, for example, and that might be the bond portion of your portfolio. You can't just only buy the stocks that have done the best most recently. You also need to buy the stocks that may do well when those stocks are down, because it's so difficult to predict what's going to happen next, and it may feel so much easier when you can look in the rear view mirror, but the windshield is not giving you the same story or journey, and so I think it's a really important lesson to think about teamwork and diversification. And, just side note, if you haven't rebalanced your investment portfolio in a while, you probably have a lot more stocks than you did a couple years ago. It might be time to take a peek and make sure you're diversifying your team.

Melissa Joy:

Number four is to learn from setbacks. Don't let setbacks end your season, so to speak. I know there are so many situations where I've talked to investors and they were really ready to throw in the towel. Maybe they felt a sense of fear, anxiety or uncertainty because of either world events, events in their own life. Certainly, I think that both headlines and talking heads have a preference for leading with fear, because that's a great way to kind of sell people, I'd say, and unfortunately, in our world of investing in financial decisions, there's going to be setbacks. You're never going to bat a thousand. In fact, if you can just make a few more, better decisions and not mess up as much, you're going to be doing great. But there are going to be days where you feel like you should have made a different decision and, instead of bailing on your process, learning from setbacks, gaining experience, working together even when the other team has scored more than you have, at the end of the day, that is really important to think about, both as an investor as someone who is really your own financial quarterback all the way around.

Melissa Joy:

Number five, I think what I would say is confidence comes with experience. You would not have expected the team that was doing postgame interviews, that was sitting back and reflecting upon their season after such a job well done, would be the same team that was struggling day-to-day mid-year and the team, even though they do not have as much experience as a lot of teams, when you look at their at-bats, when you look at their years in the majors, they really stuck with their manager and made a post-season run where they were really focusing on learning day-to-day and you could see the improvement on the field just from week to week and month to month. So all of these are really important and I think, hopefully, if you're a listener, you're gaining confidence when it comes to your own financial decisions. We hope you're pulling out nuggets, whether it's from an allegory lesson like today, or when we dive deep in a very specific technical issue. I also wanted you to know, because this episode is coming out mid-October, that we're going to have some really important and, I think, relevant resources as we lead up to the election. We're planning to have an episode on election day that will talk, regardless of the outcome, about what you should be thinking about when it comes to results and how you should think as an investor. And you may say well, why would you do that before you know who wins the election? Well, I will say this is age old advice and it really doesn't. Yes, of course, the outcomes of the election matter, and it's still important to have the same long-term focus that we're talking about on this episode, and we really think we can outlay a mindset that will be helpful for you as you navigate money decisions in context of the results in government. We also are really active on our YouTube channel right now. Both we have snippets of episodes like these as well, as we're going to have an investment and economic update that will be coming out just in the next few days if it's not out already for October, and then we'll have a year in financial planning video being posted in November. So if you do subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is under Pearl Planning, when you search for Pearl Planning, you'll find that YouTube channel. I will also include it in the show notes. Then you'll get a notification when we're putting things up like this. So I think that's really we know that this is a time where a lot is changing. There's a lot of, you know, kind of moving parts when it comes to money and the world, and so we want to make sure we're keeping you informed.

Melissa Joy:

And then the last ask. I've been hearing so many great things. So many of you are telling me hey, I've been listening to your podcast and I appreciate that. So much Thanks for being a listener. If you have a topic or episode that you think it would be really helpful for us to cover, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. You can email me at melissa, at pearlplancom, and I will try to craft some of those episodes that our listeners are looking to hear. So go Tigers, into 2025. And in the meantime, we've got some great content and episodes coming right your way. That will be exactly what you need for the rest of the year. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to pearlplancom and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.

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