How to Spend Your Time Wisely Over Christmas? As we head into the festive season of Christmas, many people find it difficult to work out how to spend their time off. With the ability to re-charge and work on one’s yourself, here’s what you should be doing over Christmas to keep your body and mind in check over the break:
First off – recharge!
How to Spend Your Time Wisely Over Christmas: Whilst you have the time please ensure that firstly you come up for air. Not only has this been a hard year health-wise and for our economy, but also mentally. This is a time where you can afford to disconnect to reconnect and go into what host Andrew Baxter calls “hibernation mode”. The Christmas period should be a time where you kick back for a short time and create that space away from work or the stock market that you most definitely deserve. Now this may seem like really basic, obvious advice – however it’s one thing a lot of success hungry people forget to do. Whatever it is you like to do- whether it immerses yourself in exercise, drink a carton of VB’s by the pool or watch the boxing day test for 5 days straight – do that. Have a break, recharge!
The Christmas pitfalls
Whilst the prospect of spending your whole Christmas break in bed watching Netflix or at the beach doing nothing may sound alluring, it can also be very dangerous. For anyone who is ‘all on’ during the working life (which we hope you are), you most definitely cannot go ‘all off’. Host Andrew Baxter recommends the remaining “hibernation mode” as to still turn on without necessarily doing too much. Realistically, you still want to keep the wheels slightly turning over your Christmas break so that when you do go back to work, you’re not feeling like your brain dead.
By the time you celebrate Christmas, watch the boxing day test and then bleed festivities into the new year through to Australia Day, to only get started in February – all of a sudden, you’ve lost 8% of your year. For anyone looking to hit 100% of their goals in just 92% of the time, you don’t give yourself the best odds. The message – avoid the Christmas pitfalls and keep the wheels turning in some respect.
How to trade the markets over the holidays
This is the Money and Investing Show, so it only helps we pass on a little advice in regard to how to actually trade the stock market during your Christmas break. This is a tough piece of advice to give as everyone’s strategies, risk management techniques and activity levels are different. Generally, our advice is to adjust your positions so that you purposely don’t have to actively manage them like you normally do throughout the year. For example, as a covered call options trader, you may decide to sell your calls at a longer date to expiry so that you aren’t handling an options expiration during the Christmas break whilst you’re kicking back by the pool in the sun.
That said, you don’t want to stop all of your investments and halt your money from working either – this is about playing it a little smarter amidst low liquidity and less market activity. Yes, you want to remain exposed to the market, albeit in a much more hands-off fashion.
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Get some clarity for the year to come
The Christmas holiday period, as much as it’s designed for you to be mostly switched off, can also be a great time to gain clarity for the year to come and to lay out some intentions. Whilst you have time on your hands, why not shape up your game plan moving forward and start to play the Chessboard early before everyone else does? One of the things Andrew Baxter is offering is a personal development, goal setting clinic that’s specifically designed to put some air in the tires for next year.
By developing a very clear game plan and setting yourself up initially with the right intentions, Christmas can be the perfect time to first disconnect in order to really reconnect. 2020 certainly hasn’t been the best year we’ve ever had, nonetheless as we move forwards into the New Year there is no reason why it can’t be the best year you’ve had yet. Check out Winning the Game for more information on how to make this a reality for yourself.
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