Happened to me for years and this is too often overlooked by financial professionals.
Think about it: when you have good returns how often do you stop to consider how you got them?
How often do you challenge your decisions if returns are good?
Most times good returns boost self confidence even though we haven't carried a post-investment analysis to see if our initial assumptions were correct or if we properly assessed risks.
We downplay the role that luck or external unforseen events had played in getting our returns.
Hence we forego an opportunity to learn something that can improve our decisions.
Until our luck turns.
Maximise your chance of gaining meaningful experience. Even when you do very well ask yourself:
What helped my return despite my expectations?
How could I have foreseen that?
What is that an example of?
What was I expecting to happen and didn't happen?
Yeh..your ego won't love this process and that's precisely why is valuable to me.