Should you even be happy when your portfolio is down? You loser.

Short answer : Yes.

Long answer : As long as your moves are rational and what you’re doing is making 100% sense to you, then fuck the results bro, the results will happen as long as the process is strong enough, it might take years until you see a great performance, that does not mean that you will stop being happy for it.

The largest caveat being that as long as you know for a fact that you’ve done everything that you can. As long as you have given your 100% in making sure that there are no faults that you could’ve known about.

That however includes:

1. Slowly and gradually learning Learning as much as you can to expand your circle of competence.
2. Constantly tracking the companies you know and can understand.
3. Making sure that you have done your complete and 100% homework either before the investment or within 2 weeks of closing the transaction.

The other thing is if you've really looked at history there are no great investors who have not had a bad year. 

It's not like Buffett didn't have bad years or Munger or Bill Ackmann, with probably the exception of Joel Greenblatt (2 down years out of 20) and Jim Simons (1 down year out of 40) there are very very rare investors that actually end up having a perfect streak.

Lest I remind you of the massive 53% downfall nightmare that Munger had to face even in the face of making perhaps the most logical bets that one could have made in those years. Obviously this was a worst case scenario but there are many such cases where the only solution that's left for an investor to do is to follow the system they've created and make sure that it's based in logic. 

It hurts especially bad when you're as immature as myself when "idiots" outperform you, it becomes very tough to digest and leads one to enormous self doubt and the thought that maybe I'm the idiot, which might as well be true. 

There is really no solution to this except keep going. 

You could sit around wallowing in self pity but there's no benefit to that, you sit here crying while your competitors are going to keep working and keep focussing, soon leaving you in their dust. 

So with my experience I would just like to remind myself that I'm doing investing for one reason and one reason only : Gambling is a fun fucking game.

As long as you're having fun it's fine if there are a few bad years. 

Consider this, if you live for say 91 more years (hopefully Bryan Johnson pulls something off),  you start with a corpus of 100,000$ and lose 5% each year for 89 of those years and in the last year you make a fucking insane 2,788,718,935.38 % return so that you end up with 29,027,232,520.63 i.e 29 Billion $ which amounts to around 15% annualised in the 90th year which by the way beats almost all dollar returns of mutual funds globally. 

This is obviously just hypothetical and a rather stupid situation but say you were in it and you had no urgent use for the 100,000 $ that you invested, it doesn't make sense for you to cry for 89 years and be happy only in the one year of your entire remaining life. 

Most people would obviously stop with this batshit crazy strategy and look for something else at some point or the other but just say I forced you to do this for 89 years, now when others show you their 25% returns in some years you can't help but feel the all too familiar pang of jealousy and anger towards your portfolio and perhaps me who is forcing you. 

The point however is even in this scenario it just does not make sense to base your happiness, your well being, your peace and most importantly your self-confidence and charisma over something that you can't even control (because I'm forcing you), in the exact same sense, the market is eventually going to reward you if you keep learning and improving yourself at a reasonable pace.

That's it, believe in yourself and keep learning. 

It's only after you've learnt how to survive can you play IRR-measuring contests with other investors but before you stake your ego, your self-confidence over this bet, make sure you're educated enough to play this game. 

If not, then just "git gud" but don't lose hope, don't stop, don't give up mid-way, you got this baby-girl.