I’m obsessed with tennis, but especially Wimbledon. In 2015, I fulfilled a lifelong dream to attend the event, which I consider to be the greatest tennis tournament in the world. See that white-clad speck on the left? That’s Roger Federer. You can click to enlarge the image, but he’ll still be pretty tiny.

From my perfect vantage point, it was incredibly exciting to watch Federer play in person. It was also fun to watch him from afar this year, as he added another Wimbledon Cup to the pile. Nearing age 36, he’s clearly still achieving “firsts” and “bests” that most of his 20-something competitors can only dream of.

How’s he doing that? Federer seems to be a fellow advocate for our Take the Long View® approach. Consider this Wall Street Journal commentary published just prior to his Wimbledon victory:

“Federer … will play for a grand slam title after doing something none of his top competitors here did ahead of the feature event on the tennis calendar—he took a break from competitive tennis.”

In other words, he won over the long haul by knowing when it was time to compete, and when he’d be better off staying patiently put. In his own words:

“Once you hit 30 you’ve got to look back and think, ‘How much tennis have I played? How much rest did I give my body over the years or how much training have I done? Did I do enough? Did I overdo it or not enough?’ It’s always calibrating the whole thing.”

The WSJ called this a “new playbook” for tennis. New? When it comes to investing, we’ve been running with a similar playbook for years.

In the horse-and-buggy days, it was common to put blinders on your trusty steeds. It helped them narrow their frame of reference to the job at hand … or at hoof.

Even today, blinders remain a great strategy for those Budweiser Clydesdales. But for us humans, a similar behavioral bias known as narrow framing is more likely to knock us off-course than keep us sensibly invested.

What am I talking about? UCLA’s behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi recently published an insightful Wall Street Journal piece on the subject. In it, he describes narrow framing as “a tendency to see investments without considering the context of the overall portfolio.”

Benartzi explains:

“The first [narrow framing] mistake involves people taking too little risk, which often leads to lower investment returns. When we engage in narrow framing, we tend to focus on short-term losses. … The second mistake involves people taking on too much risk without realizing it. When we don’t think about our entire portfolio, it’s easy to overlook the fact that many of our different investments might fall or fail for similar reasons.”

In other words, overly narrow framing can result in ignoring instead of accurately assessing your own and the market’s landscape of inherent risks and potential rewards. You end up investing like a horse with blinders on – but nobody is steering the cart.

Fortunately, Benartzi offers a few practical solutions, which just happen to coincide with our way of doing business here at Hill Investment Group.

“Rely on information that reflects the biggest possible picture,” he advises, but “remember not to look at it too often.” Sounds a lot like our motto: Take the Long View®, don’t you think? Helping families view their big picture is core to our approach.

Benartzi also notes that today’s aggregation software – like our recently released HIG’s Client Portal – makes it easier than ever to see the grand scheme of things at a glance.

If you’ve never had the chance to catch the Budweiser Clydesdales in action, I recommend it highly. (No, a Super Bowl commercial doesn’t count.) But when it comes to your investments, let your advisor and today’s technological tools help you eliminate your narrow-framing blinders. Being blinded will only lead you astray.

When Odds On was born, we quickly realized that one of the powerful benefits of having a book in hand is it gets our foot in the door at public and professional venues alike. By having opportunities to “teach the teachers” about evidence-based investing, we could spread the word faster through the power of exponential word of mouth.

That’s one reason it was fun and fulfilling to present “The Evolution of Evidence-Based Investing” to a group of attorneys at the century-old, St. Louis law firm Lewis Rice earlier this month. (The awesome view of downtown St. Louis, Arch and all, didn’t hurt any either!)

Looking back to the 1950s, it’s eye-opening to realize how far investing has come since then. That was back before computer-generated data was available to help us understand the powerful efficiencies available in our capital markets. It meant that trying to pick this or that stock was not only the typical way to invest … it was mostly the only way possible. Low-cost index funds weren’t even available until the 1970s, but what a ride, as today we’re nearing 40% of the market resembling our approach.

Are you looking for a speaker for one of your organization’s events? Let us know if we can tell you more about the evolution of investing. Not to worry: Having an awesome view is optional.

PS: Are you wondering about that weird square drawing in the photo above? Check out our “Illustration of the Month”  post.