At the risk of alienating the football agnostic, I’m going to double down on fantasy football content as we head into fall–the best season of them all, especially for those Pumpkin Spice Latte lovers out there. I’ve blathered on enough already about my favorite faux side hustle, you say? Can’t argue there, but since the season began I came to a new realization: managing a fantasy football roster invokes a lot of the same emotions and regrets as an actively managed investment portfolio produces.

Similar to individual investments, there’s an opportunity cost to every move you make with a fantasy football roster. You simply have to accept the fact that you’re going to be wrong about a great many of them. And I have a problem accepting that fact. Something in my personality leads me to really anguish over decisions that I make, be it with penny stocks or Rashad Penny.

Sweating the small decisions

Despite the fact that I’m reaching my saving/investing goals and then some, I have a tendency to fret over the minor errors at the fringes. I feel the same emotions when I make the wrong start/sit decisions with a fantasy football team. Cutting a player from my fake team only to watch them exceed my expectations leaves me with the same kind of FOMO that makes me a hazard to myself in a bull market. Seeing said player perform week-in and week-out is akin to selling Tesla and watching it go up 1% every freaking day for months. I never even owned Tesla and I felt that FOMO in my bones.

Just as you only have so many roster spots to play with, most of us only have so much money to allocate to our investments. Every decision–even if it’s deciding not to make a decision–eliminates the possibility of another. It’s rare to get more than half of these decisions right, and even when you’re right you aren’t likely to be exactly right. There’s always going to be an alternate universe in which you’ve made a different choice and thus experienced a different outcome.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, as the old adage goes. But there’s nothing small about cutting the fourth receiver on the Jets for a backup running back on the Texans. WHY IS LIFE SO HARD!?

Making constant decisions is a recipe for regret

The fact that I’m following a post about my lifetime fantasy football earnings with one agonizing over my fantasy football regrets might be a tad alarming, but fear not. I haven’t gambled away my life savings playing daily fantasy sports… yet! I merely found myself lying awake one night regretting a decision I made in a fantasy football draft nearly a month ago and realized I hadn’t felt that same stress over something so trivial since the meme craze of January 2020. If you’re going to manage your own portfolio OR fantasy football roster, you have to learn how to deal with making mistakes. That said, there’s a reason I don’t actively manage my own portfolio in the same way.

Choosing a hobby that requires constant regret-laden decisions is enough to drive a person insane, if you let it. I find that if I’m paying too much attention to it, I indeed let it. The reason index investing is such a no-brainer for me is because it’s such a no-brainer. I literally don’t have to use my brain to decide anything at all. It’s stress-free investing at its finest, and for the most part vastly outperforms the yes-brainers anyway. As I’ve written, beyond a certain point, ignorance truly is bliss.

The fantasy football equivalent to every type of investing

One way to minimize decision-making in my fantasy football pursuits is with best ball drafts–the index funds of fantasy. These drafts simply require you to pick a team of 18 players at the beginning of the season. From there, you do no roster management whatsoever. Instead of making start/sit decisions, it automatically uses your top scoring players each week. At a few bucks a pop, I was able to “diversify” by drafting enough lineups to minimize any player-specific FOMO. Here’s how I see the fantasy football equivalents to the investing world:

• Daily fantasy football = day trading
• Best ball leagues = index fund investing
• Re-draft leagues = actively managed portfolio (short-term time horizon)
• Dynasty leagues = actively managed portfolio (long-term time horizon)

Re-draft leagues are what they sound like: you re-draft players each season. The large majority of leagues with friends or relatives or coworkers are re-draft, or “home” leagues. Unfortunately, in order to participate in these leagues with your buddies, there’s no getting around the fact that you’ll have to make decisions.

Does it help anybody to know what the fantasy football equivalent is for each type of investment strategy? Not even a little bit. But it’s in my mission statement to provide the type of personal finance content that absolutely nobody is asking for.

Using fantasy football as a distraction from the stock market

A big reason for the current Impersonal Footballs Finances infatuation with fantasy football is that it gives me an outlet to make my bad, reactionary decisions on something that is, in reality, just for fun. The more I open the Yahoo Fantasy Football app, the less I tend to open the stocks app. I’ve constantly had to remind myself that I’m not cut out for individual stock investing where there’s a real dollar amount tied to every wrong decision I make. The experience of losing money–or fantasy football games–is just something you have to learn to deal with if you’re going to dabble in either. In fantasy football, it’s not so much about the money as it is about the stupid pride, so it’s a safe space to screw up so long as you don’t take it too seriously. Which, you know, I’m working on.

But as much as I like writing and whining about fantasy football while ignoring the actual, plummeting stock market, I recognize that it’s a stretch to keep comparing the hobby to personal finances. Ultimately, the only real correlation between fantasy football and investing is that Bears aren’t good for anyone.