Cutting Through the Clutter: Key Focus Areas for Retail Investors in 2025

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- Mrin Agarwal

Equities continued to dominate investors' minds in 2024. This is despite an eventful year with high volatility due to multiple global events, including a new war, weaker-than-expected economic growth, disappointing earnings, and subsequent FPI outflows. Going forward, factors like corporate earnings slowdown, sticky inflation, geopolitical tensions, higher US bond yields, strong dollar outflows due to FPI selling, and uncertainty over US tariffs can dampen market sentiment.

Navigating the challenges will make managing money daunting in 2025. Investors may also be unsure of what action to take. Here are some steps to stay on course for long-term goals.

Firstly, investors need to introspect if they can stay calm through the volatility that may play out and if they actually have a long-term investment horizon. Most investors who have entered the markets in the last five years have only seen good times and could be swayed by quick high returns. Risk-taking capacity is very different from risk-taking ability. While investors may be willing to take risks in investments, they need to ask themselves if they can accept short-term losses on these investments and the associated illiquidity.