2025: A Year of Miles, Music, and Growth
2025 was fun, messy, expensive and professionally humbling.
I travelled more than I expected, went to some ridiculous concerts, got my first tattoo and spent a lot of nights driving around Delhi for no particular reason. I also had a negative year in trading and made mistakes I knew better than to make.
Both belong in the record.
The Wanderer's Log
The year started in Thailand. Before January ended, I was back in a crowd at the Sneakers Festival watching Hanumankind, Talwinder, Ritviz, Chaar Diwaari, Karma, Raga, Arpit Bala, Karan Kanchan, Bharg and 21 Savage. That combination of travel and live music ended up setting the tone for the year.
February was mostly house hunting, with trips to Udaipur, Chittorgarh and Agra squeezed around it. March was financial year-end chaos, so I took a three-day break in Nainital. The smaller escapes became just as important: India Gate at 2 AM, Qutub Minar after dark, or a long drive with the windows down and nowhere urgent to be.
In April, a friend visiting from Hong Kong and I went for a midnight drive and stumbled into a mela outside Red Fort. No plan, no itinerary. We saw lights, stopped the car and walked in. I also got my first tattoo that month: an infinite hourglass, my reminder that time is limited but the ways you can use it are not.
May and June were harder. There were arguments, things to repair and no appetite for pretending everything was fine. I did not travel. I dealt with what was in front of me.
July made up for the quiet: Bhopal, Mahakal darshan in Ujjain, Bangalore and Coorg in one month. Then came the Himesh Reshammiya concert. I expected nostalgia; I did not expect it to be one of my favourite nights of the year. Those songs have been in the background of Indian road trips and late-night study sessions for years. Hearing them live was different.
August was Dubai. September was slower: Durga Puja pandals in CR Park and GK, good food and the very specific chaos of festival season in Delhi.
October belonged to Travis Scott, two days before Diwali. Going from that concert to lighting diyas with family within 48 hours was a combination that probably only makes sense when you live here.
Personal commitments kept November and December closer to home, apart from a short work trip and two days at Khatu Shyam Mandir. Seedhe Maut closed the year in Delhi, with Raga, KR$NA, DJ SA and Frappe appearing too.
The constants were closer to home: late-night drives through Delhi NCR, mornings at Lodhi Garden, afternoons at Sundar Nursery and at least one visit to India Gate every month. I like big trips, but these are the places that made the year feel like mine.
The Professional Reckoning
As a directional trader, 2025 was a negative year for both profitability and cash flow. The market did not suit my style, but blaming the market would be an incomplete account.
I moved away from the strategy I knew. At times I traded from frustration, sized positions to recover losses and let ego make decisions that should have belonged to the system. Those were not unlucky trades. They were discipline failures.
I wrote about the largest of those mistakes in Stick to Your Core. Publishing it forced me to describe exactly what went wrong instead of filing the loss under "bad market" and moving on.
A profitable year can hide bad habits. A losing year shows you every leak. Mine showed me that a system is only useful if I follow it when I am uncomfortable.
I also entered real-estate development. Construction began on a project that should start generating rental income by Q1 of the next financial year. Diversifying income stopped being an abstract good idea once my primary income stream had a rough year.
What I am taking from it
I am not going to relabel a red P&L as a secret win. It was a bad trading year. The losses mattered, and so did the choices that caused them.
It was also a full year outside work. I travelled, heard artists I had wanted to hear for years, spent time with people I care about and created memories I would not trade back for a cleaner spreadsheet.
Both can be true. I do not need to turn every setback into a motivational lesson to admit that it taught me something.
For 2026, the work is straightforward: follow the trading process I already know, bring the property project to the point where it earns, and keep building more than one source of income.
Outside work, I want to travel with more intention. I want to keep the late-night drives and the Lodhi Garden mornings. There is no reason ambition has to erase the parts of life that make the ambition worth having.
Mostly, I want to keep this record honest. 2025 did not need a neat verdict. It was a year I enjoyed, a year I mishandled in places and a year I will remember.