End Of Year Post 2024

 Let's take a look at what happened in 2024 and how the future looks from today's perspective:

• In December last year, I started learning Indonesian. My progress was relatively slow and I had to learn a lot about language learning to begin with. It's like other things such as dieting or muscle building: First, you have to learn how things actually work before you can start an effective treatment. I also had to unlearn some things that many of us pick up as bad habits or attitudes, like thinking that learning a language is about "talent". So far, I am starting to improve. I have about 1200 word in my Anki deck, and am starting to understand children's cartoons kind of okay. I will sink more hours into listening comprehension and reading before I try to speak.
• Stocks: Broadcom currently sits at 179 dollars after a stock split this year. It is up almost 9 times since I bought it in March 2020, and that's without considering dividends. What a powerful investment. My other investment, Tesla, is also up big.As I write this, it is about to cross the 400 dollar price barrier, which is at or near an all-time high. The weird thing is that this strong move up in the last weeks was mainly due to Donald Trump winning the election. There is no material news regarding earnings per share that would justify the stock price. This leads to a dilemma where I could hold the stock and hope it stays up, or I sell because the fundamentals don't support the share price. At the same time, Tesla announced they believe that the newly unveiled robotaxis will make it to market before 2027, but that's not something they have been very good at predicting in the past. My other investments don't make up a big percentage compared to the previous two
• I'm still at my current workplace and have been there for almost 10 years now. But I feel like my time there is coming to an end. While I can still enjoy home office (50% of all work hours), I feel like it's not a comfortable place to be any more. I could still tolerate it, but maybe I should not overstay my welcome and move on. Perhaps this will happen in 2025 and I hope I don't screw up at my new workplace if I find one.
• I'm in a struggle with weight loss. It used to be easier. I just can't keep doing the right things and fall back into old patterns.

What else has happened this year? Not much, as per usual. There was no huge vacation or anything, but we have been saving money for an extended trip to Singapore early next year.

My expectation for next year:

Finally, there will be a vacation in Asia again. I hope to relax a little and regain my sanity. I also think that there is a chance that I get a new job. After 10 years in the same job, it would seem reasonable to try something new. While I will lose some benefits like home office and not having to do much most of the time, I think it would probably help to do something different, hopefully also something that motivates me and something that is closer to where I live. I am only looking for a part time job anyway.

Financially, I don't expect much from next year. I think if we stay where we are and keep our expenses covered plus a little extra, we can keep things going well.

My goals for next year: Weight loss throughout the year at some point, even if progress is slow. Improving my language skills in Indonesian. Keeping finances well-organized. And making sure that the next years allow for some good memories, because I feel that we are losing a lot of time not making memories.

End of Year Post 2023

 Another TRANSITORY year is coming to an end. Yes, the same story as every year: Saving money for the future. Investing money to have a better life at a later stage. And not much going on that is memorable.

In fact, it is really difficult to remember anything from this year. At the beginning of the year, we were in Berlin to meet some friends and family. After that, there is a big hole in my memory. What I know at the very least is that I have vacation days that I can transfer into 2024, which means that I did not have a lot of days off this year. But, due to extended home office, it almost felt like I didn't work at all. How lucky I feel.

I looked at my plans from one year ago. I got gifted a new phone, which is great. I still don't have a new PC, but that can wait. I don't have a new matress either or anything else in that direction.

When it comes to stocks, I had my first 5-bagger. Broadcom as substantially increased in value in the latter half of this year. It even reached 1150 dollars this month. Up until the end of the first half of 2023, it had never even reached 900 dollars. And to keep in mind, this is the stock I bought in mid march of 2020, when people were scrambling to buy toilet paper.

Not only did my Broadcom shares increase in value by 5 times, the stock has been paying dividends on top of that ever since. And since I bought those shares at a very cheap price, the amount of dividends I receive are quite high, considering how much I get back in relation to how much money I put in. It won't be that much longer until I get back 10 per cent every year on top of the shares being worth more and more.

Apart from that, I bought some other investments. The main theme this year were Australian lithium stocks, which pay dividends and have a substantial amount of lithium reserves they can tap into. This will be important in the future. People tend to think that more lithium mines will open in the future, but this is a lengthy process that takes a lot of time and bureaucracy to overcome. So I'm betting on the big boys right now.

I also took advantage of high interest rates. Right now, it seems that more and more people like to buy bonds before rates sink again, but I already seized various opportunities in the first half of this year. I basically "knew" that inflation would come down again at some point and that the expectation of high interest rates would dwindle.

My wife is working part time (about 50-75% of the hours she had before) and around Easter next year, this should go down to 50% of what was still the case in August. I view this as a positive thing. We wanted to have an easier life, and I believe it is possible to live like this in a frugal way. This is what we are good at and it improves quality of life.

On a more global scale, the war in Ukraine is still going on and probably won't end in the traditional sense for a much longer time. Then we also have a new war. Congratulations to Israel and Palestine for being little babies fighting over a ball. This conflict will never come to a peaceful conclusion. As long as religious beliefs are involved, there is no reasoning that could end this. Also, I view this conflict as some sort of global "social experiment". You know those youtube videos where they enact a scene where either a baby is being abducted or a man hits a woman? This conflict is that on a global level. I'm basically waiting for some big youtuber to reveal that it was all a test: We were supposed to call it out for being a bad thing (people dying, being tortured, innocents suffering), but instead, most people failed the experiment by picking a side.

My predictions for 2024:

• Interest rates will fall eventually. Probably around the middle of the year. This will lead to an economic recovery and a bull run in the stock market. I tend to be a bit cautious and preferably err on the side of pessimism, but I think things are going to go well still.
• The conflicts in the world will drag on, both in Ukraine as well as Israel. There will be lots of talks about how China handles Taiwan, but in the end, it will just be stuff that the news channels will like to spin as doom and gloom to keep people watching
• People will again lose limbs and lives on new year's eve (pick any year in the future), and children will still die of heat exhaustion because they were forgotten in cars in summer. Some things never change.

My goals for 2024:

• Have the kitchen repaired (should happen in January)
• Have the cat's teeth cleaned and have the cat fully vaccinated (first half of the year)
• Save money for a trip to Singapore (whenever that is)
• Invest in stocks that pay dividends
• Save money specifically for future years, in order to "secure" them in case something changes in the way we decide to work
• Find a way to spend the 25 vacation days that I need to spend in a good way

I don't expect 2024 to be a groundbreaking year in any way. The predictions that Tesla stock would reach 8 dollars of EPS were complete bullcrap. Earnings are of course stagnant in this difficult economic environment. And it is already clear that next year will be the same, even if the outlook, like I said, improves. It will take time until this carries over into earnings. The only stock that will really shine will be Broadcom. But that's okay. Things will fall into place eventually.

A Hedge Against Aging

 One of the things I regret the most in life is not investing into the stock market earlier. It has to be said that investing for the first time is probably more stupid than investing when you are an experienced investor (in terms of the decisions you make then), but still, even with some beginner investments, as long as those are long term, you are usually fine in the long run.

Now that I am older an am investing in the stock market, I realise what the power of the stock market is. You can hide that power behind phrases such as "the power of compounding interest" or other fancy words, but there is actually a different way of looking at it. It is a hedge against aging.

It does not protect you from literally aging, as you will still grow old. But what it does do is this: If you don't die young, the longer you live, the richer you get. The more your bones grow weak and your back hurts, the more money your stocks will make for you. As things get tougher and you lose loved ones, at least one thing keeps working in your favour. When other things are declining, this thing gets better. Like fine wine.

If you die young and don't get to enjoy the fruits of your savings, bad for you, but at least you don't have to go through the things that suck about aging. But then again, if at least you can get something positive out of aging, then this is it. You can't manually make the stock market move forward 30 years. It is something you have to live through yourself. But the good thing is that you can let that happen "on idle". You still live your life as the main character of your own movie.

If I had invested at least some money, let's say 1000 euros per year, into the stock market for every year since I was old enough to do so, that money alone would have compounded nicely and done great things for me up until today. Not even considering the next 30 years.

Sadly, most people don't understand this superpower, and the people who would benefit most, newborns, are rarely gifted this power by their parents, who spend their money on other things.

If I actually live to see the day that I turn 70, I hope that my investing strategy was good enough to look back on my investments proudly. Of course I could also screw it all up because it's the Truman Show after all and maybe the viewers want to see me suffer. But maybe not.

The next years are basically planned for me. I know when to sell, how much to sell, and what not to sell. It's all about how things are going to play out. I don't have the slightest clue. All I know is that the last years, going back to 2017, were me catching up with time and putting an effort into investing, when between 2012 and 2016, when I already had a brokerage account but didn't understand compounding, I wasted a lot of time. And before 2012, well, there were other priorities back then.

My investing strategy is risky, as it is very concentrated, but I have to cut a few corners because I don't want to simply be able to pay the electrical bill with my dividends. It's not enough. More than that needs to happen. But I at least have time on my side, because I am not in a hurry. So no, not interested in digital currency or rich over night schemes.

As I write this, I'm waiting for my Broadcom stock to pay me a nice dividend. Thanks to all the suckers who sold me their shares in the middle of March of 2020. It's been a nice quadruple since then, even excluding dividends.

The Amazing Power of the Passage of Time

 In the past couple of months, I spent a lot of time asking questions to Chat GPT - an AI software that has incredible powers in answering questions using language. This has helped me a lot in figuring out things, especially about things that you don't know how to google.

So if I have questions about phenomena that I have experienced, but can't find the right words, I will use this Artificial Intelligence to explain if there is a word for a phenomenon and then ask why I might feel a certain way, why things are the way they are, or to explain in simple words what a certain mental concept is like.

One thing that has fascinated me for a very long time is the concept of time itself. The way in which we perceive the passing of time, and how an event can feel "like yesterday" but still be decades away in the past.

There are many powerful implications when it comes to the passage of time. Especially in combination with the power of human memory. There is a concept that Chat GPT explained to me as "temporal orientation" or "temporal" awareness, which describes a person's ability "to place events and memories in chronological order and to understand the passage of time."

Some people seem to be able to assign certain memories to a specific calendar year from very early on, but to me, it really started when I was 12 years old. That was the year when I became strongly aware of time, the year I was in, and the ability to reflect on a year that has passed and take mental notes of some of the more meaningful events that happened. That was in the year 1995. Of course I do have memories from before then, and I can assign SOME memories to specific years, but most of the time these memories are assigned to a year by some sort of association. For example: It mus have been the year 1994, because I was in 4th grade and I had that teacher, so it had to be that year.

But from 1995 on, I no longer had to construct a memory from these circumstances, I could just remember the events themselves.

One thing that has amazed me since the age of 12 is how time passes and how the perception of time passed changes over time. When I was 12 years old, an event from 1982 would have been 13 years ago, one year before I was born. As I am writing these lines, an event from 1982 is now between 40 and 41 years ago.

It feels strange because, while there is a grey mist surrounding my earliest years, I can at least recount many of those 40 years. I can come up with logical explanations as to why 40 years have passed since an event, and why it was "only" 13 years ago when I was 12 years of age. But when I think back now, 13 years seems like a laughable period of time. I think back 13 years and believe it was yesterday.

Another amazing thing about time: It is very impactful. 10 years are an enormous amount of time that impact many things in life. 10 years is an eternity in investing. You could 10x your money in 10 years without gambling, if only you invest in a fast-growing company that is not too massively overvalued when you start investing. 10 years can also make a huge difference to your looks, although there are periods in your life when your looks won't change much within 10 years at all, but other times your physical appearance will have changed drastically. So not only do 10 years matter, it also matters which 10 years you are talking about.

To some degree, it can even be scary to think about the passage of time. To give some examples: When I was a child, Christina Ricci played a young Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family movies, and now she plays an adult woman in the new Netflix series about Wednesday Addams. Aaron Carter was a child star as a singer in the late 1990s, and last year he died as a drug addict in his mid 30s. Or think of child actors such as Edward Furlong or Macaulay Culkin who are now more or less run-down middle-aged guys with mental health problems.

It leaves you wondering: Where am I going?

One of the weirdest thing, I suppose, is that fact that we (at least some of us) are very focussed on the past, but don't think too much about the future. I can't recall ever asking myself "where will I be in 2020?". The only thing I ever remember was thinking about the year 2000. But that was only because of the turn of the millenium.

What is also crazy is that I have had this blog since 2005, so I have a long library of blog entries to look back to.

When I make my "end of year posts", I only refer to an ending year,usually not a series of years. But in reality, I often think in decades. So when I am in a year, I think back to myself and ask myself the question: What happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago? Even before I was born.

So different things will come up in my mind: Childhood video camera footage, Sega video games, having to do a school internship, have trouble at work a decade later, and so on. Different stages of life, all connected by being on a year with the same number at the back.

And that's how all the memories rack up.

By the way, one of my biggest regrets and also my biggest pieces of advice if one had a child: Make them start a journal. Don't let that opportunity go to waste. You don't have anything left if you don't write down memories.

Other things relating to time would be to record things on video from an early age (video quality is better than ever) and to start investing very early, even on behalf of a child.

Time is very precious.

End of Year Post 2022

 As I write this post, Tesla sits at a new 2 year low. So in other words, all the shares I bought within the last two years were more expensive than they are now, or in other words, I lost money on paper.

The main question about all this is: Will the stock recover? I'm a relatively pragmatic person when it comes to that.There is a lot of talk about Elon Musk going insane, having extreme political views and hurting the Tesla brand, basically chasing customers away. I don't know how much of that is true, but there is one thing that I hold as a very strong belief: Earnings matter.

I don't care WHY earnings are down, if they are down. There were some bullish youtubers predicting super hot numbers for Tesla from the beginning of the year, and then when there were China lockdowns, these people argued that the "fascist" chinese government with its zero covid policy was to blame. Well, who cares why Tesla produced less vehicles than they could have produced? These are the same people who cheered Tesla on for building a production site in a country that is capable of such measures. You can't have the good things without the bad things. That is why, again this time, I don't care if it's Elon's fault, or the woke people's fault, or the mass media. If Tesla does not reach 7$ per share of earnings in 2023, it's a miss in my eyes. Whether that's china's fault, Elon's fault, lithium's fault, I don't care.

Speaking of investing: I have to admit that my obsession with Tesla got the better of me and I am now even more invested in Tesla this year compared to last year. Even now that Tesla is way down, more than 90% of my portfolio is in TSLA. I still have (and will continue to hold) my Broadcom shares that I bought in mid March of 2020. It turns out that this is a gift from heaven, and Hock Tan is an amazing CEO.

Apart from these positions, I don't hold much else. I have a couple hundred bucks in a gold ETC, and I am starting to build a position in commodity stocks. I've started with Glencore, then bought Albemarle, then SQM. I believe that battery material miners can be a good investment now that the overall market is down, inflation is high and these rare metals are critical for the transition to sustainable energy. It's also a good alternative to Tesla, as well as a complimentary investment to Tesla ("go long what Tesla is short").

My priority now is to buy income-generating stocks, so dividends are becoming more important.

Speaking of inflation: This year was crazy with inflation. We saw price increases of over 10% depending on what you are looking at. It's crazy. Milk used to cost 1 Euro a couple of years back, now it's 2 euros. Electricity and heating are up, but not as bad as we tought a while ago.

Oh and by the way, we had parity between the euro and the dollar. Crazy times. Usually you could buy one dollar with 0,80 euros or a little more, but that's it.

2022 was a year that was, to some degree, yet another transitory year. But I did get to travel to the Maldives, which is definitely more than just your average uneventful vacation. So that is something about 2022 that I will remember.

I visited my father around Easter, had another Visit from sister in law in May (and again in december, with her mother).

All in all, the main focus has again been saving money, because there has been a tough down market. Oh year, by the way: Russia invaded Ukraine. I thought I should mention that. It was one of the main reasons for the whole inflation thing.

And because of that, naturally, the markets went down, the central banks started raising interest rates because of inflation, that was the start of the whole bear market. Whether we officially call it a recession now or next year doesn't really matter. I have to keep buying shares, and now that I am done buying Tesla I need to look for high-yielding dividend stocks. Preferably in great industries such as lithium. If I have to, I will also settle with more typical dividend investments, depending on where the markets go.

In hindsight, I would have maybe bought a little less Tesla and more Broadcom and lithium stocks. But now that stocks are down, I can't reverse that course. And when Tesla is back up again, sentiment will have changed anyway, so I will probably be stuck with all those shares one way or another.

Going back to the whole 7$ per share story: If Tesla reaches 7$ earnings per share, the stock should trade at a share price of around 300 dollars, give or take. Not 162 dollars, as it does right now.

But then again, there can be a dozen reasons why that won't be the case. I just try to focus on earnings because that is the long term driver of stock prices. That and the growth rate of the business.

Some of the more bullish people forecast 8, 9 or 10 dollars per share, but I think that these people are the ones who are always excited about everything Elon does and will always point out the positive things while never critizising the bad things.

The longer term view should be more exciting, with products like the Tesla Semi and the Cybertruck growing in volumes. But it does not really matter because we don't know anything until the actual earnings show through. It could go either way anyway.

By the way: I don't care about autonomous driving, FSD, robotaxis. That's just people dreaming in my opinion. If something has the potential to work as a lottery ticket and increase your share price by 10x, why would you make plans for what to do with the money? It either happens or it doesn't. There is no need to plan your finances around something that is so unpredictable. You'll have plenty of time to think it trough if it works. Which is something I don't burden myself with.

What are the plans for next year:

• Buying a new phone (yes, still!)
• Buying a new matress (we got the bed but the new matress is not good enough)
• Buying a new PC (unless a tablet does the job - we are at a weird point in time where PCs seem to be replaced by mobile devices, but they don't fulfil all the tasks of regular PCs yet)
• Saving money strictly for dividend income (no more Tesla shares)
• Waiting for an economic recovery

On a positive note, home office at my work place is still possible, although we switched to a 50% rule, where half the work has to be done in person. But I did spend a lot of months this year only really going to work once a week until that came through. So time has been on "fast forward" for a long time.

I'll see you around...

End of Year Post 2021

 Another year went by really quickly. Yes, another transitory year. So basically again like in the last few years, this year was all about the future and preparing myself and my finances for enjoying life a little bit more a couple of years from now.

What can we say about 2021? First of all, the pandemic from last year is still going strong. Covid / Corona lasted longer than previously expected. Last year, the consensus was that we would get a vaccine in late 2020 (we did) and that we would then defeat the virus (we did not). So, even now in december 2021, we still have lockdowns, still wear masks, still have new variants that the vaccinations may or may not help against.

On the positive side, this meant lots more home office for me. Actually, I was scared during the summer days that we would "defeat" Covid and have to go back to normal working environments at my job. But instead, the maximum that I remember is having to go to work for 2 days every week. And even after that, when things got worse, we moved back to total home office. So I enjoyed staying at home.

What happened this year in terms of vacations/fun stuff? Not much. Got a nice visit from the sister in law, so that is something I enjoyed. Apart from that not much happened, just sitting tight and waiting for things to stay normal. My wife went to Singapore without me, which is okay because it would have been a nightmare in terms of covid-related measures that need to be considered. It could have cost a lot of money if things went wrong.

Then of course there is investing. We saved a lot of money between 2017 and 2021. I went through the numbers and they are insane. We put so much effort into saving. And it becomes like an addiction to some degree, because there is always some way to spend the money to invest it and grow it into something bigger. So you are left asking yourself: Why would I spend the money on consumption (new phone, new computer, new vacation) if that money is worth a lot more just a couple of years from now? But there needs to be a balance, or else things go out of control and you dont live life as you should.

Portfolio update: A lot changed from last year. The concentration is really crazy. 80% of the portfolio is now Tesla. Big risk, little diversification. But the company is doing extremely well and I feel well-informed about them. The remaining percentages are made up of Broadcom (which has tripled since I bought it), Abbvie, Medifast, a little bit of Palantir and my genomics stocks (Crispr therapeutics, Intellia, Editas and Beam).

New stocks I am watching right now: Palantir (maybe buy back more since I sold them to buy Tesla), Rio Tinto (soon a lithium miner), Celsius Holdings (interesting low-calorie energy drink) and perhaps going back to Shopify (again, sold for Tesla). There are always more investing ideas than there is money.

A crazy thing worth mentioning: The portfolio value more than doubled compared to before the pandemic. Now, to be honest, a part of that doubling is that I was not all in before the pandemic, also we kept saving money. So it is not all gains, but also partially savings. But the amount of money we now have is beyond what I dreamed for looking at January 2023, when I turn 40 years old. It is also possible that this number will have doubled some time next year - from January of 2021. It is the crazy power of compounding on steroids.

What am I looking forward to in 2022? Here are some things:

• Saving money for stocks (not as much as before though)
• Buying some necessary items (new bed, new phone, new PC)
• Going to maledives (if covid allows)

The future should be interesting and I am looking at a situation where life should stabilize a little to the point where saving, saving, saving is not the top priority any more. I think we did well and can now enjoy the snow ball effect. It should also be noted that, after saving and investing a lot, there comes a time when any new money invested simply doesnt add up as much as before in terms of percentage added. So what used to be an additional 20% or 10% of money saved up, will over time turn out to be only an extra 5% or less of the total money in our portfolio.

Blown Away - Literally

 There are two things that are certain in life: In summer, there will be news about children who died in cars because it was a hot day and they were forgotten by their parents, and in winter, there will be injuries from fireworks because people just can't learn a lesson.

This year, on the turn from 2020 to 2021, it was possibly going to be different. Because of the Corona / Covid pandemic, fireworks were either forbidden, restricted or the sale of fireworks was limited or outright forbidden.

This meant that a lot of people would not be using fireworks this year, either because it's too complicated to get things going or because they were going to stay home anyway.

But there were already experts predicting that the number of injuries would still be high. Because of the sales ban, many people might be attempting to use illegal or old unused fireworks. This would be dangerous. So people expected injuries, torn away limbs after all.

And man... new year's eve did not disappoint. Just this morning, I read about not only many injuries, including the good old torn off hand, but also two deaths. One of these deaths included a man who got his head "torn off" by fireworks. That's what I call "going out with a bang".

I know it is tragic, but in some way it is also morbidly amusing. The one year when you might expect things to be a little more quiet, people go out of their way to get killed. It takes a lot of skill to kill yourself with a self-made, unapproved pyro rocket. And even if you get killed, having your head blown off is an achievement of its own. On the other hand, I think the media picked up the story in a very grateful manner and really sensationalized it as much as possible.

So in some way it's funny how people just never want to learn from the dangers of fireworks. It seems that there always has to be that yearly tribute of torn off hands and burnt skin, almost like in the old days when people were made human sacrifices to pacify the gods.

I do understand that accidents can happen. But when you really follow the rules, only use safe fireworks, and apply caution, usually nothing too bad should happen.

So, I suppose we'll see how the summer season turns out. How many children will die in heated cars this year? In a number of years, we will hopefully have cars that can detect a child dying inside, so it will take precaution. But until then, lots of preventable stuff will happen.