How much have I earned and lost in 2025?

Objective for 2025 was to more actively trim the underperforming stocks in a market rally to return money into my warchest to capitalise on the next market downturn.

Unfortunately, at the start of the year, there was market correction also known as the "tariff shock" where there was so much uncertainty.

I did not sell or buy anything for the whole year, which is the first time in my past 20 years or so. Paragon REIT privatised, and that marks the end of my best golden goose. Not only did my $30k capital have a $4k profit, since 2013 IPO, I bought more in 2016 and 2020, and had accumulated $15k of dividends.

On hindsight when I reflect about my decisions, I realised that there were a few reasons:

• stocks remain at historical high valuations with no apparent fundamental reasons, by fundamental I mean factors like substantial increase in profit margin, or reduction in debt interest costs. Instead, it's just narrower profit margins, stagnant unsecured borrowing costs.
• economic uncertainty unseen in history, where US was driving a de-globalisation agenda which was the exact opposite of what contributed to the past 100 years of economic growth?
• I wanted to keep my warchest for market downturns, so I decided to just adopt a wait and see attitude instead.

As a whole, dividends are up, which is a good thing, but it also means the probability of a market correction is even higher than before, and if it does happens, it's going to be really bad because the current highs are a lot higher than the past.

At the same time there is a race to see who implements Artificial General Intelligence first. Absurb levels of salary compensation makes Meta look as if the world is going to end if they don't implement AGI first and money isn't a problem -- a 24-year-old AI researcher, Matt Deitke, reportedly received an offer around US$250 million, where $100 million is payable in the first year.

Perhaps AGI will really be life changing, but before that day arrives, I only can analyse what category of tasks AGI would be able to excel in. 

If I broadly divide tasks into brainy, fine motor and gross motor, AGI will likely excel in some brainy work, with potential to possibly help improve efficiency in gross motor work, and perhaps some fine motor work in controlled environments. Examples of work which are considered as fine motor work in uncontrolled environments are surgery, dental tasks, machinery/devices/anything hardware repairs. 

If I further divide brainy tasks into fluid intelligence, crystalised intelligence, emotional intelligence, AGI will likely excel in fluid intelligence work, such as read and summarise contents, translate, basic to intemediate level trainer, follow an SOP to perform triage in various industries, etc. basically tasks that are performed by junior to mid level staff. 

While shifts in hiring are to be expected, I don't think it's as grim as some people are painting the future to be. Fresh graduates would most likely be taking up jobs that don't currently exist yet and we also can't tell what these jobs are because it really depends what new problems are created and subsequently need people to work on solving those problems. For example in the previous "Software as a Service" and "Ïnfrastructure as a Service" market consolidation that saw giants like Cisco, IBM, Oracle and SAP lose substantial market share as companies shifted to Microsoft and Amazon, new jobs were created that were centred around the new products, such as Amazon Web Services AWS administrator who needs to still have linux OS knowledge and also need to have python programming skills, as opposed to say a network administrator who needed to have primarily linux OS knowledge and did not need to know python at all.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts.

Overall passive income, excluding the SPH REIT profit was $22k for the whole year, which is motivating enough to keep me invested.

My objective for 2026 is to cut my expenses by 10%  so that I can channel that savings into my warchest. In the event of a market correction, I will not feel like I don't have enough cash to deploy.

Oh yes, and the boring chart.