A bit late doing my year end ritual as i was traveling.  There were a more downs than ups in the year 2016.  A brief summary.

1. Finished 4 papers of my CFP exams (Risk, Investment, Retirement & Tax Planning modules).  If not for a lot of interruptions, would have attempted the Advanced Financial Planning module in November itself.  As of now, its pushed into the new year.
2. Read just 5 books in the whole year.  While i read a whole lot of other literature.  Broadened my reading interests into medicine, astronomy, personal finance, behavioral finance, company annual reports etc
3. Watched more than 90 odd movies.
4. For the first time started watching TV series and a whole new world of entertainment opened for me.  Once i started watching TV Series, i lost interest in movies.  Watched all seasons of House of Cards, Breaking Bad, The Americans, Narcos, The Night Manager, Billions, Banshee (2 seasons), Homeland (1 season) & The Good Wife.
5. Traveled a lot.  Multiple trips to Bangalore, Kerala, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Haldwani-Kathgodam, Srinagar-Srikot (Uttarakhand)
6. A loved one had a real health scare and i spent more than 20 days at the hospital attending to him.  Watching death from such close quarters made me realise the importance of being healthy.
7. Towards end of October, started going for early morning walk/jogs. Tried to stick judiciously to the daily 10000 steps target throughout the year.  Did a lot of calisthenics (body weight exercises), some free weights and aerobics.  In just about 5-6 weeks was able to have a better toned body and dropped a few cms from the waist line.
8. For the 5th year running, the annualized returns of my equity portfolio beat the annualized returns of the Sensex.  Its not something that i consciously ever worked upon, but it just happened. Some of the best performing stocks in the portfolio were Sonata Software, Hindalco, Bharat Forge, Rallis, Gruh Finance.
9. The blog got hacked and i had to totally wipeout the site and rebuild. I had infrequent and incomplete backups and so restoration was a pain. For an IT guy, not having proper backups of the website was a big mistake to commit. Didnt matter much as i hardly blogged in the past year. Had thoughts of letting the domain name go, but i have already been holding the domain name for more than 6-7 years now. I have some interesting plans for the same in the future.

As always, the new year presents more challenges and am actually looking forward with much more excitement.

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