Some honest assessment of my investing strategy and why "steady but surely" beats "get rich now" if you're not devoted to trading

I've recently been dealing with a lot of stress due to losses trading and not timing the AI boom properly, leaving me not only in the red but relatively much worse than if I had just bought an indexed ETF following the general market. This led to me doing some assessment of how much money I would have made had I followed the wisdom of the crowd and not try to DYI my investments.

I've held most of my NW in cash, around ~$200k because since 2022 I've been waiting for "The Big Crash" and doing taxes for stocks in the country where I live is a pain in the ass. I have about $150k in two other accounts in the US and LATAM where I can trade more easily. In 2022 I was able to "beat the market" by staying in cash and riding my country's burgeoning bull market to a paltry +7.5% for the year (much better than $SPY's -18% or $QQQ -32.5%).

In 2023, I kept doing stock-picking and managed an improved +12.8% performance which this time underperformed the SP500 (26%) and NASDAQ (54.8%). I still kept most of my money in cash so these profits were mostly from trading with around ~20-30% of my NW.

In 2024 I had my best year, obtaining profits for +22.9% of my NW and still I underperformed the SP500 (24.9%) and NASDAQ (25.5%). These two years my stock picks were mostly bad but were salvaged by some good selections in my country's stock market, which boomed 58.3% and _120%_ respectively those years.

But the next year the stock market in my country began a bear market. I was -$10k on the year after Liberation Day and began to panic. I felt that any new investment I could make could potentially be "the top" and could only make my yearly losses worse. Then I started gambling with options. I had some good luck playing earnings and 0DTEs and managed to salvage the year and finish another paltry +13% (vs. 17.72% by SP500 and 20.77% by NASDAQ).

This year, my bad performance picking stocks caught up with my luck running out with options. I've lost up to -$20k so far in the year while SP500 is +8.45% and NASDAQ is +14.92%.

This got me thinking: what would have been my performance if I had invested in ETFs instead of trying this bizarre combination of conservative + gambling trading approach?

I ran some backtests assuming I maxed out my pension contributions (I don't have the exact performance data since I'm not subscribed but since I'm Europe-based I assumed it would follow $IEUR) and I put the rest on $QQQ. The result is that I would have been about 15% richer. And that's with a conservative approach of investing only about $1000 in $QQQ and over $3000 (assuming employer contributions) in $IEUR. And I'm not even accounting for bonuses. _And_ I'm also not taking into account the enormous amount of stress trying to reach my yearly +10% goal takes on my mental health each year, which would have basically been 0 with passive investing.

The point of this post is a bit of public auto-shaming and also a warning for whoever is also trying to "trade" while holding a full time job. I'm not sure it's worth it unless you're _really_ committed, i.e. you spend your weekends reading books, reading balances, analysing stocks, building bots and algorithms and setting up notifications to stay over your investments.