The Olympics & The Stock Market

Oct 06, 2024

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Hi everyone!

My name is Greg Duncan, and I’m a 4th-year trader honing in on my edge trading high-volume gap-ups. Earlier this summer, I achieved a lifelong dream:

I won Olympic Trials on 3-meter in the Synchronized Diving event & qualified for the Paris Olympics, earning the honor of representing Team USA on the world’s biggest stage.

(Tyler, my teammate on the left, and me on the right!)

Sara invited me to share some of my main takeaways from this summer (and my career as an athlete), plus how lessons from high-level athletics can be directly applied to trading.

On the surface, these areas of life may seem different — one potentially being 95% physical while the other is 95% mental, but there are so many overlaps worth diving deeper into.

With that being said, here’s what we’re going to cover today:

The 3 Skills Necessary To Qualify For The Olympics & The Application To Trading

3 Mindset Parallels: Expectations, Pressure, & Doing The Little Things

Short & to the point, focused on actionable takeaways so I don’t waste your Sunday 🙂

Let’s get into it:

What did it take to qualify for the Olympics?

I began my diving journey when I was just 11 years old. Fast forward 14 years, and I would’ve never imagined that I’d be standing on the edge of an Olympic dream, qualifying for Team USA.

When I look back on the journey now, it still doesn’t feel real. But it is, and I’ve been able to process the experience to boil down key takeaways from a decade+ of incredible experiences.

My diving career has shaped me as a competitor, trader, but more importantly, as a human.

To give you an idea of the drama surrounding my and my teammate Tyler’s qualification… we had to get nearly 80 points on our final dive to qualify for the Olympics. This was a 12-dive event coming down to the absolute last dive, something similar to Michael Jordan hitting his famous shot in Game 6 against the Utah Jazz in 1998 to win his 6th championship… (no, it wasn’t that crazy, but it was definitely high pressure).

In trading terms, this is like being required to execute on your best setup to near perfection, and if you don’t, you lose your account (because if I didn’t qualify, this was going to be my last dive ever!).

Here’s the video on how it turned out (skip to 3:45 to see the last dive, but this was our entire list with all commentary and drama included):

All in all, an absolutely crazy night. But there are some key skills that I’ve identified and want to share with you that made the whole thing possible:

Skill #1: Perseverance

For some athletes, qualifying for the Olympics is a pretty seamless experience (crazy enough, I know). For some traders, becoming profitable is the same way.

For me, athletic success was never easy. And over the past 4 years, making money in the market hasn’t been that easy either.

Diving wise, there were so many periods throughout my career in which I felt like giving up, whether that was due to injury or poor performance. I actually almost retired after the Olympic Trials in 2021 when I got absolutely blown out, starting to doubt if I was even capable of achieving something as crazy as qualifying for the Olympics.

Clearly, I didn’t retire… and over the next 3 years, I committed to doing everything in my power to make this Paris team. If I didn’t, the writing was on the wall. If I did, well… :)

As I said, I had tons of setbacks along the way: injuries, poor performances, choking under pressure, difficulties getting my body into elite shape, and learning the hardest dives in the world. It’s been hard, but I never gave up.

I really do believe approaching the market with a “never going to give up” attitude is what separates those who make it big from those who just skate by (or blow up altogether).

I’ve had setbacks in the market as well… trades I put on that overnight gapped down 30% and losing 10% of my capital in a matter of minutes, prolonged year+ drawdowns because of greed/fomo and lack of discipline… the list goes on and on.

At the end of the day, I lean on my diving experience and know that no matter how long it takes for me to become a great trader, I’m going to stick it out until I don’t have any more resources at my disposal.

You’d be surprised that if you just keep showing up, good things eventually happen (sometimes in ways that you’d never have imagined). And yes, it is a choice. If you wake up the next morning, things are always in your control. Just keep going.

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Skill #2: Discipline

It goes without saying but if you want to achieve anything hard in life, you need to be disciplined.

There will be sacrifices. There will be days where you don’t want to show up. There will be setbacks. Burning out is real.

Before ever becoming a success, the only thing that really matters is whether you continue to show up and persevere even when the odds are stacked against you.

Through diving, I learned how hard it is to get up early and work out. I learned that my best performances in practice and in competition come when I get 8+ hours of sleep. I mastered the balancing act between school, weight training, and actually practicing. It’s 25+ hours a week of hard work with no shortcuts. Hard… but worth it when you realize that you’ve built a level of discipline that 99% of other people in the world won’t achieve.

There are very similar balancing acts in trading.

You must sacrifice going out or being social
You must be disciplined with daily & weekly routines
You must spend hours in front of the screens, no shortcuts

Trading is another full-time job. There’s no way around it. If you want to succeed, you have to put in the work.

The positive is, you can acquire the skill of discipline. It’s not something you’re born with or without. It is simply little pieces of effort put in every single day, expanded over months, years, and decades.

Skill #3: Letting Go Of The Outcome

Leading up to the Olympic Trials in June (where I competed against the top athletes in the US for a spot on the Olympic Team), I was kind of in a rut. I wasn’t finding joy in training, I wasn’t myself at the pool, and when I got home, I was stressed out overall.

It was only through working with my sports psychologist did I realize that I was so focused on the outcome, qualifying for the Olympics, that I lost all appreciation of where I was currently at and the progress I had made over the past 14 years as an athlete.

Funny enough, I was completely obsessed with an outcome that I had no control over (the application to trading here is obvious), that I was blocking myself from getting the exact thing I wanted. Hilarious how that works.

The only reason I was able to stand up there on my last dive and perform under pressure was because I had completely let go of needing to be an Olympian. I really just enjoyed the moment.

How can you let go of the outcome as a trader and ‘enjoy the moment’?

It’s really easy to get caught up in the money side of trading. And what I’ve learned is that your perception of self and how you view money is really what drives performance.

The more you ‘need’ to make it (the same as the more I needed to make the Olympics), the less you’re going to make it.

Yeah, we’re in a performance-based industry, but when you tie your sense of self-worth to performance, you’re going to feel pretty shitty about yourself.

The actionable takeaway is this:

You really have to focus on the inputs. Focus on what you can control — showing up every day, running through your routines & building your training plans, as well as doing your post-trade analysis on a weekly or monthly basis.

You’ll build confidence by focusing on executing the inputs that are in your control.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but when you so aggressively focus on the outcome, you completely lose sight of what’s required to get there—finding joy in the inputs.

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Performing With Expectations & Pressure

At a certain point, you can’t push your body to perform anymore. You’ve dialed nutrition, sleep, and weight training. Your ‘in the pool’ work is already done. The last thing to optimize is what goes on between your ears — the real difference between good and great in any performance profession.

At a certain point, you can’t do any more chart analysis. You can’t study your trades anymore. No amount of in-depth write-ups will help you execute any better when the time comes.

What really matters is how your brain works under pressure.

Pressure Is A Privilege

Again, some people are born knowing how to compete. There are athletes that win literally everything from the time they begin competing at a young age all the way to when they hang it up. I was never like that, and I’m sure many of you weren’t either. While it sucks to underperform, especially when the pressure’s on, there’s a silver lining:

Learning how to perform under pressure is a skill. It can be acquired and mastered. All it takes is a little bit of a mindset shift.

So often, we view performance as a threat — whether that be to our ego, our sense of self-worth, or whatever you want to tie it to. But of course, the more we fear crumbling under pressure, the more we do. So, how do we learn how to compete when the lights are the brightest?

You have to learn that pressure is a privilege. Instead of “having” to perform under pressure, you “get” to. It’s an honor to be in a situation where you can put on your best.

Performance is not a threat to you; it’s actually an opportunity.

You can apply this lesson to trading in many different ways… but the key is to realize that your perception shapes your reality. If you view every losing trade as a threat, you’ll never learn from them. If you view each one as an opportunity… the sky's the limit.

Wrapping Up

At the end of the day, high-level athletics and trading share a common thread—both are about mastering yourself.

Whether it's executing a high-difficulty dive on the world stage or placing your capital at risk in whatever market you trade, the real challenge is mental.

Perseverance, discipline, and letting go of the outcome are three key skills that helped me qualify for the Olympics, and they’re the same skills that will help me become the best trader I can be.

Every day, you have to show up, put in the work, and trust that the results will follow. But even more than that, you have to learn how to embrace pressure and see it as a privilege—a chance to prove to yourself that you can perform when it matters most.

If I’ve learned anything from my journey from an age-group diver to an Olympian, it’s that if you’re willing to put in the work, great things can happen. You just have to keep showing up.

Greg Duncan

@gregduncan_ on X

I’ve written a free email course on my earnings gap-up strategy here.

If you haven’t already, go through Sara’s Mindset Mastery course! It’s amazing ;)

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