Happy New Year

My family and I want to wish all my blog readers a happy, healthy and prosperous 2026.

Staycation:

I had a relaxed 2-week winter break, where I chilled out at home and read few new books I had purchased recently. The first two (Hooked and Irresistible) were required reading for engineers at TikTok, the most addictive app know to man. The Tim Ferriss book was only $15 (50% off) and features life advice from several successful people. Seeking Wisdom was one of the BEST books I have ever purchased, and I will be rereading it several times. The Great Mental Models is another outstanding book. Joys of Compounding is yet another terrific book bought earlier, but I am re-reading for investment advice. I am planning to pull $250K out of my IRA retirement account to invest with the author of this book, which I will elaborate on below.

My sister had organized a family Zoom get-together for my 65th birthday, which I was happy about, as we have had a couple of family zooms in 2025.

FOCUS

Reflecting on the FOCUS message from my previous blog post, I cut out some distractions for 2026. I’ve deleted both Facebook and Instagram apps from my iphone and ipad. If I really feed the urge to look at either, I can log in via the browser. I also deleted the discord app on my iphone, and quit the Pixaroma discord server where I used to participate in a daily challenge. So far I have not missed it as much as I thought, but I fear my ai art skills will get rusty.

REBALANCING INVESTMENTS

This year I intend to use Gemini as my main chatbot and LLM of choice. I actually used Gemini for financial planning advice and end of year rebalancing.

I sold some Nvidia as well as Palantir, and several stocks where I had minimal investment remaining due to those stocks tanking or losing 80-90% of it’s value. The odds of these recovering are microscopic so I exited those distractions.

I added some GOLD ETF as well as some extra Google stock on which I currently have a higher conviction.

My current allocation is shown below.

Since the bulk is US Centric, which in turn is AI-Tech overweighted, for further diversification, I plan to sell a portion of my “other” stocks to invest in a private equity fund focused solely on Indian stocks. This will be via Gautam Baid’s – Stellar Fund. These funds are for a long term investment horizon, perhaps a decade, and I cannot exit on a whim but must give at least 60 days notice. This 3 year fund had a 71% average return to date, but of course there are no guarantees. A recent interview by Gautam is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRjr6Zd7xx0

GEMINI DASHBOARDS

I saw an interesting video how Gemini can be used to rapidly generate an approximate (directionally correct) dashboard ! This does not bode well for the traditional Tableau dashboards that data analysts use extensively at work. On LinkedIn I noticed a number of Tableau Guru's leave Salesforce, the parent company, in the past quarter. Salesforce may be focused on Agentic workflows, and I also think the stock options of many senior Legacy Tableau folks had just vested.

MISOGI CHALLENGE

In one of the youtube videos I saw, last year the host done a Misogi challenge- A Japanese term for one hard challenge or accomplishment that can serve as the highlight of your entire year. In his case, he learned to play a complicated classical piece on the piano, where he previously had no piano experience at all. As a new year resolution, I may try to implement this, but something based on physical fitness, like exercising a certain amount or losing a certain amount of weight.

REST OF JANUARY

The first week of January will be pretty busy at work with quarterly and other reports that need to be run, as well as a new dashboard I'm responsible for. We are taking a trip to Manhattan next weekend to meet my sister-in-law who will be visiting from Florida. Later in the month, I look forward to a St. Sebastian festival at our church, followed by an international potluck dinner.

Until next time...