Double My Income and Get a Life

…that’s my goal for 2009. Losing mummy tummy, shedding that extra flab with regular exercise, spending quality time with family are resolutions which are passe now for me. Anyway, who cared about calories burnt after the first fortnight of the New Year…breaking resolutions was as much in vogue as having a wish list ready before the year began.
When careers change and one transitions from a full-time corporate job to freelancing, priorities re-align as do goals. For the first time in all these years, last year I targeted a few things (if only as a mental note) I wished to achieve before the year ended. My goals for 2008 were:

1. Get published in a magazine
2. Learn how to drive a car
3. Self-sponsor a trip to Bahrain

At the end of the year, I could cross off items 1 and 2. With 4 pieces published in a travel magazine, 3 in a national daily, 70 research articles for a industrial info website, and a few more copy-writing work, it was a good start to my first year of freelance writing. The sponsor part of item 3 was met though the trip didn’t materialize for whatever reasons.

Here I am, in 2009, writing down where I would like to see myself at the end of the year. One lesson learnt from past experience is that it doesn’t help to have a generalized goal. Having a target defined quantitatively and qualitatively makes assessment all the more easy.

Las Vegas revisited

Would you believe if I said I’ve been visiting Vegas atleast 3 times a week the past month? May not in the literal sense but it is a trip to Vegas every bit every day experience wise. It was December 2003 when we first visited Vegas, a day after Christmas, to be precise. We had a lot of fun in that trip, thanks to the Casino hopping.

My tryst with the stock market began two years back when a former employer allotted 56 shares in the form of ESOPs. I got them into my Demat account and never did much with it. Thank god for that. It was a golden goose that just sat there and reaped us over 100% profits. Then it all changed in December 2005 when our fondness for the markets grew. It was also a coincidence that I began work on a project for Credit Suisse around the same time and we started putting together our finances well, so I started getting a grasp of the fundamentals of banking, capital markets, trading and such. Our interest in the secondary market grew and V pursued it. With Lil General on the way, one thing led to another and I left it mid way to pursue it again now.

If you want to know how to lose money, ask me for tips I’ve lost more money in the last 3 weeks than I’ve gained. Ofcourse, I’ve not lost a lot because I don’t play big. If you don’t play big, you don’t win big. This is why I said it is like visiting Vegas everyday. At Vegas all we did was spending time on the slot machines with a $20 bill every time. What do you expect of an Indian techie on a project on a H1 visa? Whatever you win goes back just to lose some more. You never have enough of it. I call it quits to day trading everyday just to go back the next day. It is addictive.

Day trading is exactly like this for me. I don’t play big. I don’t know the rules of the game. I am learning the tricks by playing small. I had my first small success on a margin trading call today. That kind of squared off all my losses till date.