PATIENCE IS LIKE A MUSCLE (Guest: Leslie Harris)

Leslie Harris spent roughly 40 years in markets, beginning at the Comix and ending at Greenwich Capital, and now works as an executive coach to traders and portfolio managers. He describes Morris Sacks, who passed away approximately a year and a half before the recording, as a rare combination of great trader, great trading manager, and great risk manager simultaneously, noting that most great traders fail at the management dimension. Sacks handled difficult conversations by always taking them off the trading floor and conducting them in a clinical and transparent manner.

The central thesis Harris returns to throughout the conversation is that patience is like a muscle that must be deliberately exercised. He argues a trader only needs to be right three or four times a year to be successful, and that overtrading wastes both mental and financial capital. He did not fully internalize this lesson until after 40 years in markets and identifies the failure to develop patience as the most common weakness he observes among portfolio managers today.

Harris argues traders should hold only tier one trades in large size and eliminate tier two and tier three trades entirely. The mental tax of trading is the same regardless of position size, making marginal trades especially costly. A losing trade on a tier three idea is a bad trade by definition because process quality is what separates a bad trade from simply a losing one. He cites Sacks's practice of advising traders to go through a portfolio and exit any position they do not love. He also advises traders feeling doubt about a position to sell a third, observe how they feel, and continue reducing until the position is gone, framing this as a way to make exiting feel less psychologically difficult than anticipated.

Harris says spending less time in front of screens leads to more trading success, attributing poor afternoon trading partly to the stimulating nature of screen time causing poor self-regulation. He notes Sacks kept movies playing while trading so that watching films prevented him from making poor decisions. The host acknowledged stopping afternoon trading entirely after recognizing he consistently lost money during that period. Harris monitors physical tension and being short with colleagues as signals that his judgment may be compromised, and maintains a vibrant internal dialogue about his trades as a check on whether his reasoning is sound. He views meditation as a risk management tool and emphasizes consistency of practice over session length.

On current positioning, Harris has reduced his long equity exposure to the lowest percentage of his portfolio in a long time. He stress tests his portfolio daily against a potential 30 percent drawdown, has built roughly two years of liquidity, and describes his objective as protecting accumulated capital rather than growing it aggressively. He has sold many Mag Seven positions but retains some, distinguishing between liking a company and liking the stock, and notes many current valuations are priced for perfection. He points to equity market cap as a percentage of GDP and price-to-sales ratios as indicators that equities are very expensive, noting Warren Buffett was able to buy Apple at approximately three times sales while Apple later traded above ten times sales.

Approximately 18 months before the recording Harris became constructive on commodities and bought equity stakes in Noble, Glencore, Bally, Rio, and Alcoa rather than buying commodity calls directly, describing himself as a mediocre commodity trader. In 2026 he bought ETFs covering Colombia, Chile, Peru, Africa, Turkey, Israel, and India as a derivative play on what he believes may be an early commodity bull cycle, with the Colombia ETF trading under the ticker COLO as a particular favorite. He acknowledges he could be wrong about cycle timing and notes a strong US dollar represents a meaningful headwind to those emerging market positions.

Harris identifies the bundling of technology, lower barriers to entry, and electronic trading as the most significant structural shift in markets over the past 20 to 30 years. He notes that today anyone can trade millions of dollars using only an iPhone app with no attachment to a financial firm, which was impossible in earlier eras. He also observes that the professional trading community has shifted from a revenue-producing model to an AUM model, with large asset management firms now optimized not to lose money rather than to make money, which he believes makes markets different and potentially more unstable. He draws a parallel between current AI IPOs and the dot-com era, arguing it is unclear which companies are the Google and which are the Ask Jeeves of this cycle. He recommends Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger as essential reading and identifies Munger as the trader he would bring to a desert island.