End of Year Recap

I think the wildest thing about the times we live in now is that so much is happening all at once, it’s easy to forget where we came from, the changes we made, and sometimes that something even happened at all. With so much access to news, everyday feels wild now. Remember when a Boeing starliner got stuck in space for months? Feels like the presidential election was years ago. SMCI topped 1200 dollars before threatening to become delisted.

In the stock market, a dump that feels never ending in one moment is but a blip on the radar when the year comes into review, and boy is that ever true for 2024, the year of the V-shaped recovery. What’s wilder though, is that it feels like the year has done nothing but go higher, however we had some really large pull backs over the course of the year, they just got bought back to highs.

When we’re doing our end of year review, it’s important to look at the market as it was, not how it felt. This is so we can separate out the opportunities from frustration. If I remember nothing but slow grind and rotation, I completely miss how many multi-percent broader market pull backs we had for swing trade entries. If I remember only days of SPY going sideways with small range, I miss out on the rotation we had in the sectors and the movements we had in hype sectors like uranium, crypto and quantum stocks which had fantastic moves. Our memories can easily deceive us, especially if we weren’t always acting in accordance to our plans, or if we were frustrated by the movement.

The opposite can be true as well. We could have timed the movements poorly, but lucked out on the bulls saving every move. We could have adapted to an easy swing mindset, and mistakenly think that our day trading was equally as effective. Going through the data is the number one way to prepare actionable goals to improve our trading for the new year. By ensuring we are equating accurate market data with our actions, we can see where we have to improve, and we can also make plans for how we can recognize shifts in the market when they happen.

How to review a year

Check yourself. Check your best trades and your worst trades. Go back and look at the chart on the day of your entry. Look back at the trades, what stopped you out? How well did you hold? How did the move play out after your exit? What did you miss? Were you too early? Did you not wait for sideways consolidation first? Were you playing in good moving sectors? Were you trying to play rotation that didn’t happen? Were you caught in laggards that never caught up? Were you playing the lead bulls bull and the lead bears bear? DId the market conditions support your trade? Were you fighting the trends? Did you let your winners run? What was your preparation like for trades? Were you hyperfocused on certain sectors or did you broaden your horizons to new opportunities? Were you forcing trades when the moves had moved on?

Check the market. Without emotion, look back at the market. Look at the fear dips, look at the v-shapes, the fomo runs, the sectors that were strong, the ones that were weak. Match it up to what you tried to do and find the discrepancies. If you feel that you don’t understand some of the market, go back and watch some of the monthly recap videos that gave a broad overview of all the sectors, and the hot places to watch. Did you dial in on those zones, or was your focus elsewhere?

At this point you should come away with a list of market conditions, things you did well and things you did wrong. Sit with that list. Refine it. Go back and check it twice…. because the next step will be to make the next year even better.