Bad investing habits don't get fixed on their own. With each new year, the market just gives you a fresh set of chances to repeat them.
That's why, at the start of each year, I sit down and take account of the past year's worst fumbles and figure out how to avoid them next time around. Here are the three mistakes from 2025 I absolutely do not want to repeat. Please try to learn from my experience.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. I let FOMO bulldoze my plan
My default approach to Bitcoin (BTC 0.86%) is dollar-cost averaging (DCA), which is buying a fixed dollar amount of it on a regular schedule regardless of its price. It's intentionally boring, and, at least when I sit back and let the automated purchases I've set up do their thing, it keeps any single buy from carrying too much emotional weight, or from messing up my cost basis too much. You can probably see where this is going.
In 2025, I got impatient and made a large, unplanned purchase as the coin was ripping past $120,000, a level it had never reached before. I told myself I was being decisive and taking advantage of the substantial amount of unallocated capital I had on hand. Actually, I was falling victim to crypto FOMO (fear of missing out) for the hundredth time, and this time more destructively than (almost) any other. Of course, the price has dropped a lot since that big purchase.
CRYPTO: BTC
Key Data Points
I didn't sell, and don't plan to, as I still believe that the long-term investment thesis is strong. But I made my cost basis for my position -- the average price paid -- vastly worse, and for no strategic reason. My new rule for 2026 is that if I want to buy an asset faster than what my current DCA schedule has planned, I adjust the size of my regular purchases for a defined window of time.
2. I procrastinated until I got left behind
I had been aware of Zcash (ZEC 1.25%) for years. In 2025, I watched its narrative heat up while I stayed lazy about actually doing my own diligence in advance of potentially making a purchase. But in a fast-moving market like crypto, laziness is never free, and it gets billed to latecomers through vastly worse entry prices.
By early October 2025, Zcash had more than doubled over about a week as privacy coin demand surged. A month later, it briefly overtook its biggest rival, Monero, by market cap, which was yet another sign that attention inside the privacy niche had shifted in its favor. Only then did I panic and do the reading and thinking that I needed to do to decide whether I wanted to own it.
Ultimately, I bought some of it and started a DCA, only to immediately be sitting on a loss.
CRYPTO: ZEC
Key Data Points
I am still accumulating Zcash, and in the big scheme of things, I am not panicking about the timing of my first purchases, as I'm quite confident in its position over the long term. But I still missed out on a lot of growth because I didn't bring my focus to bear during the period when my mind first started to nag me that there might be money to be made with the coin. Telling yourself that "I'll get around to researching this later" is a decision to accept buying an asset at a premium if the investment thesis is right.
My fix for 2026 will be to think more explicitly about the costs of investing in an asset late when I detect that something on my radar is starting to look more interesting.
Would that have saved me from this mistake in 2025? Probably not entirely, but it likely would have been a step in the right direction.
3. Tariff panic made me freeze
In early April 2025, the tizzy surrounding the Trump administration's newly imposed tariffs left me extremely disoriented and also a bit fearful for my portfolio. Over two days, the market erased about $5 trillion in value as investors priced in what they then perceived to be a rapidly rising risk of a recession. Then, on April 9, 2025, a 90-day tariff pause was announced, and the market surged.
That volatility triggered one of my worst habits, which is going inactive when conditions are turbulent. I stopped adding to one of my core positions, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY 1.28%). I also paused on my purchasing of one of my favorite businesses, Costco Wholesale, because I worried that the stock looked both expensively valued and highly exposed to tariff-driven disruption to its bottom line.
NYSEMKT: SPY
Key Data Points
At least so far, the tariffs haven't made the sky fall. The market powered upward in 2025, causing me to miss some gains, and Costco's stock entered doldrums, causing me to miss the opportunity to load up.
The solution for next time? Take unpredictable and anxiety-causing market conditions as an opportunity to practice being levelheaded and consistent in implementing the strategies that I know work.
