I am a new "investor". Although I have been trading since 2 years, I have mostly lost money. The reason for that was the extremely short duration of holding time. Did the same mistake repeatedly. Almost 80% of the loss was due to day trading. So, that's about the bad part. Good part is that I have finally woken up and started "investing" for respectable time frames now (more than 2 years or till the time I get at least 25-30% profits). And learned the golden rule of cost averaging. For the uninitiated, cost averaging is buying of an asset at regular intervals to mitigate the effect of volatile price movements on your portfolio. (more can be found on searching the net). Now, I invest a part of my salary into the market every month and hope that the portfolio that I create slowly will give me decent returns. That's all I have to say about myself and my mistakes. I hope and wish to see myself as a turnaround story.