Why doing nothing is sometimes the hardest—and smartest—investment decision

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the 2007 film Chak De India!, coach Kabir Khan (played by Shah Rukh Khan) delivers a famous speech about the “Ye 70 minute!" of the game. For investors, however, the more useful lesson comes later, during the final penalty shootout.

India and Australia are tied. As the Australian player steps up, Kabir Khan watches her feet and stick and signals his goalkeeper: “Don’t move! Stay put!". The keeper holds her ground, stays perfectly still in the centre, and the ball flies straight into her hands.

Game over. India wins. The moment works on screen because it feels counter-intuitive.

Under pressure, standing still looks reckless. Yet that instinct—to act, to dive, to do something—is often precisely what gets us into trouble. This column argues that one of the biggest risks facing Indian retail investors today is not market volatility, but a psychological compulsion to act, even when inaction would produce better outcomes.

The math backs the movie moment. Research on penalty shootouts shows that while shooters score about 84% of the time, a goalkeeper’s chance of making a save is significantly higher when she stays in the centre rather than diving left or right, roughly 3.5 times higher, according to one study. So why do elite goalkeepers almost always dive? Behavioural scientists call this action bias: the tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing, especially under pressure.

Action signals effort. Inaction looks like failure, even when it improves the odds. Action bias is deeply ingrained.

For our ancestors, survival depended on reacting quickly to threats. A rustle in the bushes rewarded those who jumped first. We are the descendants of those instincts.