What an incredible lesson for us. At least, for me.

First, I was cocky about assets in securities and crypto. I kept a lot of cash, at the time it was 1/3, and the advice was, "What are you doing, cash is trash, man." Let's just say that now that cash ratio is more like 1/2 and increasing, while the cash hasn't increased. Brutal stock market beating and it's continuing to bleed.

I observed a major difference in opinion, in the last two years, between private economists / market researchers, and academic economists. I trusted the academic economists, who told us that inflation was transitory, so on and so forth, "blah blah blah velocity of money is what matters, blah blah blah, you should ignore those who say that we're printing too much, blah blah blah a broken clock always strikes twice." The market people were right: the housing forecasters, the real estate people and the wealth advisors who manage money and put out research reports -- they were all correct. The academic economists mostly seemed to side with the Fed and were Incorrect. "But Russia.." no, this started before Russia.

It's obvious to me today that an economy is comprised of goods and services; when we locked down the economy in the U.S., well de-facto, we locked out businesses, we handed out checks and we did stimulus package after stimulus package (Trump and then Biden, you can't partisan this), that we were giving money out while the goods and services produced were decreasing. Thus the ratio of money (which we printed) to goods and services is out of wack, hence, inflation.

I've been pushed to the fiscal conservative end of things, at least a bit more. A Democrat my whole life, it's clear the Keynesian vision is nutty as is the conversation around "corporate greed." I saw in slow motion how the Covid lockdowns enriched the likes of Amazon, and how low interest rates enriched the rich, how it's contributed to a nation of renters (corporate real estate investors used this money to buy out huge swathes of Atlanta, Phoenix and so forth to rent out homes to people who were trying to buy them).

Perhaps the Austrian School folks have a point about macro interference in the economy.

It's clear I was greedy. I thought about, but did not, sell high-flying stock gains (400% in some cases on non-meme, and 50+% on crypo), because "time in the market is better than timing the market" and I wanted to wait at least a year at a minimum. God how wrong that is. In retrospect I should have captured the gains better, instead of watching it drop at the end of last year and waiting for it to inevitably come back up.

It's clear that I'm not as comfortable financially as I thought. Living (like many of you) in a very HCOL area, since my assets were going through the roof I spent and didn't save. Now, I can't even save; I have plenty of savings, since I'm old, so I'm not paycheck-to-mouth, but I'm essentially working all day long and shoveling money into the pockets of my landlord and a lot of other nonsense.

It's clear I should have bought a property, any property, and I almost did, when the interest rates were at 2.5%.

Summary for me personally, very subjectively: seize the moment, don't overthink, don't dilly dally, while Fate passes you by.