Happy 2025

This one is going to hurt me bad!

January 02, 2025

personal

A look back at 2024

2024 was a fairly eventful year all things considered on the professional front:

  1. I finally became a professional investor on the buy side
  2. Learned a lot about what actually goes into doing due diligence on a business
  3. Tried my hand at Private Equity with some of the best people in the business
  4. Very quickly realized I would be terrible in a hierarchical environment regardless of whether it was IB or PE and did course correction (i.e. quit a job that could have set me up for millions)
  5. Moved to Singapore to work for a Hedge Fund covering Indian Equities!

Honestly if you asked me, the day I ended up in B-School if my life would end up here, I would have laughed you out of the room. Life works in funny ways! xD

What do I not want to change in 2025?

Touchwood!

Meme

  1. My work-life balance has been in the best possible shape over a period of a gruelling last 6 years since undergrad. I am very grateful that it has turned for the better and I wish to keep it this way.
  2. I like living in Singapore and would want to at least spend the rest of 2025 here. The city is beautiful and I am yet to explore so much of the food scene that the place has to offer!
  3. I recently made the trip back to India after a 2.5 month stay in SG for one of my best friend’s wedding. I do still miss being around my parents and some of my closest friends in Mumbai. I hope I can keep making such trips every 1-2 months!

What do I want to achieve in 2025?

Yes, these are what are also called resolutions

Meme

  1. Health: I want to be in a better shape. That is going to be my top priority for the year, hopefully I will go back to how thin I was in insti. I want to go from being fat and ugly to only ugly.

    \(\rightarrow\) Will track regularly using Strava - make sure I get an hour of exercise in on a daily basis till my weight comes down

  2. Code: Write more code this year vs 2020-24 combined. I used to be a decent software engineer eons ago but that skill has started to rust. Goal here is to make sure I push atleast a 100 lines of code every week to my Github.

    \(\rightarrow\) Will track regularly using Github / Obsidian

  3. Social: Now that I have moved to a different country, I am pretty worried about how much my social life back in India is dwindling. To course correct, I plan to call atleast one person (my parents don’t count) who lives far away on weekends.

    \(\rightarrow\) Will track using Obsidian

  4. Investing: I’m finally in a job where I can work on building theses directly on individual stocks (rather than private businesses which are hard to track post a deal if missed). Goal here is to build a coverage set of 20-25 names that I have a complete handle on.

    \(\rightarrow\) For long I’ve wanted to look into Capital Goods, Healthcare, IT/Internet, and Retail names when I worked in public equities. Track using office tools at work.