“Over 40 years in the air, but in the end I'm going to be judged on 208 seconds.” – Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger 

Seeing the trailer to Clint Eastwood's “Sully,” I was blown away by the elegance of the above quote. Take a moment and think about the truth of that statement. In so many professions and in so many aspects of life, a very small period of time can define one's life in the eyes of the outside world. Irrespective of your profession, more likely than not you are defined not by years of hard work, but by small periods that are extreme, painful, and largely unpredictable.

Anyone who has known Sully or worked with him for decades knows far more about his life, and his professional career beyond the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Yet, I suspect that the image of that floating plane likely overwhelms any prior opinions of him. It is as if everything before that moment didn't even matter. This is what we, as lazy humans who think both fast and slow (a la Daniel Kahneman), do all the time. Politicians are masters at this form of exploitation, focusing on the brief moments in time where one's leadership was suspect or questionable. Whole judgments are made on wildly small samples of time which can be highly consequential, regardless of whether the outcome is positive or negative.

Markets are no different. Stock market volatility, though often memorable and extreme, historically has been relatively short-lived. There are far more up days than down days. But when those down periods do occur and equities are gyrating wildly, that is when investors begin noticing the value of their accounts the most. That is also the environment that traders and money managers are most remembered for in terms of how they handle those air pockets. As well they should be – any endeavor which does not follow a normal distribution but is susceptible to low probability/high impact events requires judgement in those tail risk periods.