For most of you, today marks the start of a New Year. With that usually comes wishes and resolutions. I’ll start off by wishing you all to live your dreams, have quality time with your family and friends, and being healthy.

As for resolutions, I guess we each have some and I’m personally one who believes a lot in these. So far, I’ve usually been able to make most of them work to a good degree which probably helps me come back with more. In terms of investing, I’ve discussed some of my objectives and I will also obviously be putting efforts to save even more in 2012 than what I did last year. I think that while getting good returns is clearly more fun and exciting, the best way to add to our portfolios is just adding a bit more every month than we’ve done in the past.

I’m excited for 2012 to start and I hope you are too, Best Wishes And Thanks To All Of You Who Read, Write Comments and/or emails, I truly appreciate it and feel blessed to have these relationships with you,

Remember, life is short, live every day as if it were your last one,

Best wishes,

IS

Like everyone else reading this blog (or most of you at least), I am very much looking forward to starting 2012, especially to start my 2012 technology stock picks again. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing these picks, and I’ve certainly missed doing new picks in the past 3 months.. That being said, I’m nervous about doing the next ones. Why?

Putting It All On The Line Again

Many say that traders are only as good as their most recent returns. I don’t entirely agree but I do understand the idea behind it. Just think about it this way. The last time I opened a new trade, I knew that the difference between an amazing trade and a bad trade would likely be finishing 2011 with a return of over or under +50%. I think you’d all agree that while the return of 75% or so is incredible, being a bit lower would still have had a huge impact. I can’t imagine anyone thinking much less of me simply because the 2011 would have been “only” 50%.

Back To Square One

That being said, in a few days, I’ll be right back on the start with a 0% return in 2012. That means a few bad trades to start off the year would have a huge impact on the return obviously. Things might start off well as they have in both 2010 and 2011 but they could always turn out bad as well. Let’s face it, even with these great returns, I’ve made almost as many bad trades as good ones. The chances of starting with 2-3 losing ones is not that small.

What Happens If I Start Off The Bad Track

The big question of course is how it might (or not) affect me if I made 3-4 bad trades to start off the year. How much would I question myself and would it affect how I would do my trades? I would like to think that 3-4 trades would not be enough to shake my confidence but that is probably underestimating the emotional aspect of trading. That is also why no matter how things go, I will probably discuss the psychology of trading a lot more in 2012. Hopefully I won’t become a case study of how things can go wrong:)

Not Much I Can Do At This Point

I will likely open 2 or 3 new trades next week and at least one more the following week. That should help “diversify” my risk. If you are interested in these long and short tech stock picks, please be sure to join our free newsletter about technology long and short trading here:

That being said, I hope you will have a wonderful weekend, ,

IS

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to invest when our country is going bankrupt. Still to this day, I get comments, reactions and ‘tweets” almost every day. It does seem like many are worried about these types of scenarios. One of the things that concerns me the most is that I don’t trust the government would ever tell us if things did get serious… Or they would, but only when it would be too late. Right now, tens of European leaders continue to work on finding solutions for countries like Greece, Ireland but also the big ones like Italy and Spain. We know that Italy is paying almost 7% of any newly issued debt and that such a rate is unsustainable. But do you feel like the Italian government would ever tell its citizens if things got really bad?

History Says It Wouldn’t

Look at recent economic or financial issues such as Argentina and Russia and you’ll see that those that were taken by surprise the most were the citizens of those countries. Obviously, it’s easy to understand why. The whole system, from banks to currency and the government is built on one fundamental; trust and confidence in the system. For example, if banks only hold a few % of the deposits that you and I made (they ledn out the rest), it does not take that many people withdrawing all of their money to create major issues. The whole system is built that way.

Is The Truth Hidden?

Remember all of the huge discussions and debates that occurred when the government did a $700B bailout package? Many were against it but in the end, it was judged that it was better to go ahead. What is less clear now that this has been made public is why the Fed made nearly 10 times that amount, $6.8T, available to financial instutions. Why? Many believed that the whole system was on the verge of a collapse and that huge banks could start going down left and right. I don’t think anyone would ever say that letting that happen would have been the right thing to do. It might have made things even worse to let everyone in on the real story of how bad things truly were.

But I Still Wonder…

What other things do we not know right now? How close is Europe from collapsing and what kind of consequences would such a failure have? I don’t know about you but while I’m not going to start a panic movement, and accumulating food and water in my home, I do keep this in mind when deciding what to do with my money.

How about you? Do you trust your government? Do you consider such things when deciding what to do with your money?

We are exactly in the middle of those days where so many of us take New Year resolutions, things that we will start doing, be more consistent at and also those things we want to avoid going into the New Year. Last week, I discussed the few changes that I will make related to my long and short technology stock picks. There are many other financial and investing goals that I will attempt to do, mostly trying to be smarter with my money and my spending which will hopefully translate into more savings.

In terms of financial decisions, finding some money to be saved in insurance and other recurring expenses will probably be the best way to get it done. If I can find a $100 per month for example and increase my automatic savings by that amount, it will end up making a very significant difference.

From an investment perspective, I am hoping to invest significant amounts into:

-The best investment I have made in my life
-Some longer term speculative picks… Zynga (ZNGA) is one possibility, LinkedIn (LNKD) at the right price, another option that I will discuss later this week and obviously some Facebook stock if it comes out anywhere close to a decent valuation.

From a blogging perspective, I hope the quality of posts on this blog will continue to increase so that it can hopefully keep up the growth. These days, the blog has between 500 and 1000 readers on almost every day, and I’m hoping that all days will be over 1000 by this time next year. Again, I appreciate all of your feedback in helping me making this blog more interesting and relevant.

-And more than anything else, more time with my family – I think we all realize more and more over the years how valuable our close friends and family truly are and I am going to be focusing on the 20/80 principle more than ever before. Why? Because that is what will help me get more results in every aspect while also managing to get more free time to spend with my loved ones.

I would love to hear about your 2012 resolutions and objectives, thanks for being part of this growing community.