What you should Learn from 2009 Before Proceeding into 2010

On last Friday of 2009 I would like to wish all the readers Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in Advance, but before Proceeding into 2010 there are many things which we should look into and learn from them. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Your Best and Worst Investments – You should break down investments to the level you could and see which investments have worked for you and which have not. Make a note of them into an Excel Sheet if you can. See if Mutual Funds have worked for you or shares? Has Real Estate been your star performer or is it your Gold / Gold ETFs? You can even break down as to which mutual fund worked for you and which did not.

How to improve on your Worst Decisions – When you have done the classification on things that worked and things which did not do that well, next thing you should see is why your investments worked? Surprised! But yes that’s true. You should first see why things worked and can they also work in near future. Then you should see things that did not work and see what chances you see that they will work in future. Were your decision wrong or there is something else that made your decision go wrong. Learn from the mistakes you did by loosing your hard earned money.

How you can improve on your decision making – Next thing you should focus on is how you can keep learning new things. Definitely you need to learn from the mistakes but then also think of reducing the mistakes upfront by getting sufficient knowledge to avoid the mistakes. They will not go completely but yes you can reduce them to an extent. What could have been done in a better way? Try doing that in the coming year.

My Biggest lesson learnt – I just found that in stock market you need not take impulsive decisions all the time and if you are into the market you are bound to take many decisions which you are not suppose to be taking. Take a break from the market. Recently you may have realized that I update this blog weekly instead of daily which I used to do few months back.

What are your lessons that you would like to share?