Olympian Ryan Murphy’s quest for gold in Tokyo and the stock market

Ryan Murphy’s interests extend far beyond the swimming pool, as the three-time Olympic gold medalist is putting his love of finance to good use by playing the stock market. In celebration of Financial Literacy Month, the Tokyo 2021 hopeful shares his tricks of the trade.

Video Transcript

RYAN MURPHY: I am Ryan Murphy. I'm an Olympic swimmer. I won three gold medals at the 2016 Olympics and hoping to go to the 2021 Olympics. So my degree was in business administration, so I felt like I got kind of exposed to a lot of different areas of business.

One of the things that I like to do just to just kind of fill my time and keep myself mentally engaged is follow the stock market. I'm a nerd. I'll admit it. I come kind of from a family of nerds.

My grandpa has written over 100 math textbooks. My mom is a college math professor. My dad started in accounting, and now, he works in finance.

So I feel like I've been surrounded by numbers my whole life, so I think the stock market is a pretty natural hobby for me. It definitely keeps me on my toes. In the stock market, I don't know. I don't know what the right time is.

I don't know when it's a good deal. I think I know, and that's part of what makes it interesting. And I'm always learning. Like I think when I first started in this my senior year of college, I made a lot of mistakes.

There were times, where I was like, oh, like this is a great company. I'm going to get it right before earnings, and then it goes down, like, 10%. And it's like, OK, you know, that's probably not a good decision to make. Let's learn from that, and now, it's like, OK, I really got to follow these things for a couple of months before I decide to dive in and invest.