In 2023 I did something I'd been avoiding for years: I actually tracked my own returns honestly. Sat down, built a proper spreadsheet, and put in every real number from three years of trading. No rounding up the wins, no quietly forgetting the losses. Just the actual math.
It was uncomfortable to look at. Genuinely hard to sit with. Because there it was in plain numbers: years of "active" effort, all that time and stress and screen-watching, had underperformed a simple index fund. A fund I could have bought once and completely ignored would have done better than everything I'd done on purpose.
So I moved my entire trading capital into index funds. Quietly, no big announcement, just did it.
And weirdly, it didn't feel like defeat. I expected it to feel like giving up, like admitting I wasn't good enough. Instead it felt like finally being honest with myself. The spreadsheet didn't care about my ego or my effort or the story I'd been telling myself. It just showed the truth. And once I'd actually seen the math, pretending otherwise wasn't an option anymore.