A Distracted Investor's Journey: Investment Goals for 2016

Wow, I've had this post sitting around for quite some time. Better late than never :) I won't polish it too much as quite a bit of time has passed and this post will become less relevant.

When first starting to invest, the idea came from a friend to trade; buy the stock low when it went down then sell higher when it recovered. Sounds simple and it is... when it works. That didn't pan out to riches mostly because my available cash was too small and commissions would eat up most of the gains. Even when my available cash increased I still wasn't successful at trading. Frustrated, I turned to a story about my grandfather who had "millions" in stocks that paid out dividends. That opened my eyes: Passive Income. To this day the majority of my portfolio is geared towards this capital intensive slow and steady strategy. My goals aside from $50k a year in distributions is to continue expanding my investor tool kit and learning different ways to use money to make money. (Another lesson about my grandfather.)

2015 was very interesting as I drifted from different tools and jumped into two major firsts that surprised even myself:

- Using margin (borrowing) to invest for the long term.
- Write options.

Now that I've taken those steps there are more things to learn and hopefully execute upon:

- Explore how to use various Options strategies.
- Understand charting
- Short Selling
- Hedging strategies
- Learn and develop performance metrics.
- Earn an additional $10/Day or $3600/yr from Options. (Work towards the challenge my friend proposed last year)
- Explore and develop more revenue streams.
- Increase Passive Income from stocks.
- Diversify portfolio by sector and geography.
- Keep discipline and increase cash savings.
- Add Real Estate to my assets, ie. buy my own place.

Some of these goals may be somewhat conflicting with one another such as increasing cash savings while both increasing passive income and buying my own place. Definitely, something that would pull me in too many directions and strain resources.