What Wimbledon can teach investors about patience, probabilities, and staying in the match
As Wimbledon approaches, tennis fans around the world will watch the best players in the game battle through missed shots, momentum swings, and pressure-packed points.
When watching greats of the past like Federer, Djokovic, Navratilova, or Serena Williams it seemed like they couldn’t lose. Some players have been so dominant that it seemed like they would win every point.
They did not even come close to winning every point.
While giving a commencement address at Dartmouth in 2024, Roger Federer illustrated this wonderfully. Looking back on his career, Federer said he played 1,526 singles matches and won almost 80% of them. Then he asked the audience to guess what percentage of the points he won.
The answer: 54%.
That’s right, one of the greatest tennis players of all time won barely more than half the individual points he played. And he was not alone. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic show a similar pattern. According to ATP statistics, Nadal and Djokovic each won 54% of their total points over their careers, while winning the overwhelming majority of their matches.
That is the remarkable thing about tennis. A small edge, repeated over and over, can produce extraordinary results.
The same idea applies to investing. i
Much like a single point in tennis, on a daily basis, the stock market is unpredictable. Fidelity data on the S&P 500 shows that the market has been positive only a little more than half the time over short periods, but much more frequently over longer periods.
| Time Period | Historical Frequency of Positive Returns ii |
| 1 day | About 53% |
| 1 month | About 63% |
| 1 year | About 75% |
| 5 years | About 89% |
| 10 years | About 94% |
| 15 years | About 97% |
| 20 years | 100% |
This is why reacting to every down day can be so damaging. If Federer, Nadal, or Djokovic had treated every lost point as a disaster, they never would have become champions. They missed shots and lost rallies. They had bad games, bad sets, and tough losses. But they kept playing.
Investors need a similar mindset. A down day does not mean the plan is broken. A difficult month does not mean the strategy has failed.
The real risk is letting short-term emotion pull you away from a long-term plan.
No one can control the market’s next move. But we can control how we respond. We can stay diversified. We can rebalance when appropriate. We can avoid making emotional decisions during periods of volatility. And we can give time the chance to do what it has historically done: turn a small long-term edge into meaningful results.
Investors do not need every day or every month to be positive. They need a plan, patience to stick with it, and the discipline to keep playing.
– Ted Creegan CFP
i I could argue this applies to just about every other facet of life as well.
ii Data is for the SP500 since 1928. Information sourced from Fidelity We Believe brochure appendix B
