A Happy and Healthy New Year to all of you reading this post.
It wasn't the best of Decembers with both my health and net worth spreadsheets displaying a lot of red and with the goal of being green all over, this was not good.
These aren't recommendations, but for the record they are AbbVie ($ABBV), Applied Materials ($AMAT), Amazon ($AMZN), Alibaba ($BABA), Bristol-Myers Squibb ($BMY), Salesforce ($CRM), Alphabet ($GOOG), NVIDIA ($NVDA), Palantir ($PLTR), Thermo Fisher Scientific ($TMO), UnitedHealth ($UNH) and VeriSign ($VRSN). For crypto I'm now in on Dogecoin as I mentioned back in November.
For my net worth spreadsheet, December ranked 194th of 194 in real terms, although it was "only" the 190th worst in percentage terms. And yes, while it's sad that I've been tracking this figure since 2008, my son (age 34) already has 12 years of such data!
The post US election rally has evaporated. Although some of my individual stocks are still ahead, overall the broader indices in the US are now lower and as I have mentioned many times, this is where most of my money is invested.
Retirement gets real in the new year as I shall be dipping into retirement funds to pay for my not-so-lavish lifestyle now that the severance has been used up, and withdrawing during a downturn isn't ideal.
Reversing the mindset from one of accumulation during my working years to decumulation in retirement almost overnight isn't easy. I've had a nice transition period thanks to the severance, but it's time to adjust.
I'm removing the 'target' sections which have served me well during my earning years, but which now serve little purpose as I am, for the most part, now at the mercy of the markets.
Perspective is always important and while December has been terrible, July and November were the best and third best months all-time respectively, so it's not been a terrible year overall. 
All these years have had the benefit of a salary, and while that became less of a factor in recent years, with market gyrations having the biggest impact, there was a comfort factor in having that steady income.
The S&P 500 ended up 23.3% for the year, with the FTSE 100 up 5.7% and my 'play account' for individual stocks was up 26.5%, in large part thanks to gains for Bitcoin (+121%), $TSLA (+63%), and (perhaps rather surprisingly) NatWest ($NWG +81%).
Other market beaters were Walmart ($WMT +72%), Chipotle ($CMG +32%), and Berkshire Hathaway ($BRKB +27%) but of course there were losers - notably Target (-5%), Boeing (-31%), and Pfeizer (-11%).
And as I wrote in August 2022, acting on investment tips from your daughter's boyfriend isn't the best of ideas. Despite almost doubling in 2024, I am still down 87% on this "investment" in $MNMD.
Looking ahead to 2025, which is the only year I will see that is a square number, and there are a few other stocks and crypto I am buying into with some cash I freed up after selling some of my Tesla position.
Apologies if this isn't of interest to you. I am fully aware that most of the above post is of interest to one person, i.e. me, as it's nice to have a record of where I was with my thoughts at the start of each year. I do like to read the thoughts of others, and Ian at Pension Builder is always worth a read even if his updates are few and far between! Interesting to see that we have - or had - a couple of stocks in common, Lloyds Bank and Palantir although Ian has sold out his position in the former.
I also agree with his comment here although 1/12th seems on the low side! :
As a result of Trump winning the US presidency - I'm no fan of his by-the-way - I've invested a 12th of my portfolio value into the S&P 500 via iShares. I've no idea which way the US stock market will go, but (if it goes up substantially) I don't want to miss out.
On to sports, and with just one week of the NFL season remaining and a 23-28 record, it's almost certain that the basic Small Road 'Dogs System will see its second consecutive losing season after being profitable in 15 of the previous 17 seasons. With a 17-11 record for the Divisional bets, we're close to breaking even on these overall, but more on this when the regular season wraps up.
The College Football season has finished with the newly expanded playoffs currently in progress, and for these the basic Small Road 'Dogs System had a 76-71 record, with the FBS games 76-67.
Back to my health / weight, and while some of the gain is from building more muscle and focusing on weight training during the latter part of 2024, I do need to get back on track with my calories. I have two weddings, a school reunion (50th), and a climb up Helvellyn coming up and an expensive (for me) suit purchased when I was 11 1/2 stone (162 lbs) which I need to fit into (for the weddings, not the climb up Helvellyn!).
Fortunately I know how to do it, but it's just rather slow and not the most fun with alcohol a big factor.
While exercise is very beneficial in lots of ways, for losing weight (by which I mean fat) it's far less important than calories ingested which has a correlation to wight loss of about 88%.
Fewer than 2100 calories a day, and the weight falls off. Simple. Another Dry January will get the year kick-started.
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