After 20 years in investing, one lesson still keeps repeating itself: you have to be able to separate emotion from facts.
That sounds obvious. Every investor says they analyze, compare, and make logical decisions. But the truth is, the market is emotional, and investors are emotional. Decisions are still often made from fear, greed, or FOMO — even when we tell ourselves they are rational.
That was one of the clearest lessons of 2025.
At several points during the year, it felt like I had missed the real rally. I had already been invested in technology through private companies for some time. In public markets, I held large technology names like Meta and Apple. But when it came to chipmakers, I kept missing the entry. I never found the place where I felt confident buying, and I stayed out.
That created the classic investor discomfort: the feeling that everyone else is moving and you are standing still. The story in your head becomes simple very quickly — I missed it, I’m behind, my portfolio is in the wrong place.
But when the year ended, I looked at the facts instead of the feeling.
I had three startup exits. The Tallinn Stock Exchange had risen quietly, almost invisibly, by around 20%. One of the startup investments had an annualized return of roughly 40%, with more upside if certain KPIs are met. And when I looked more carefully at the US market, another important fact appeared: dollar returns are not the same as euro returns. Once converted from dollars into euros, the US market performance looked very different because the dollar had weakened materially during the year.
So the emotional story was: I missed the rally.
The factual story was: my actual returns and exits were better than I had allowed myself to see.
That gap matters.
Because if I had acted from FOMO, I would have started reshuffling the portfolio in a hurry. I would have “played around” with it just to reduce the emotional discomfort of feeling left behind. But that would have been a different decision, based on a different input. Not facts. Emotion.
And this is where many investor mistakes begin. Not with lack of intelligence, but with the inability to distinguish what is happening in the market from what is happening in your nervous system.
A useful principle from 2025 is this: things are rarely as bad as they feel.
In Estonia, for example, the general investor mood was still quite negative for much of the period. Yet by the end of the year, the economy was already showing signs of improvement. Inflation had eased. Export industry was recovering. Major transactions were still being done. Large foreign investors were still making investments in Estonia. It was not true that all foreign capital had disappeared. Quite a few big deals were completed.
But perception lagged behind reality.
And that works both ways. Sometimes the mood stays negative after conditions have already started improving. At other times, sentiment stays optimistic long after things have started turning weaker underneath. Emotion moves with a delay. Facts move first.
That is why investing demands more than instinct. It demands discipline in how you check your own story.
One simple tip is to write the facts down — on paper or in Excel. Why are you making this investment? What are the actual returns? What assumptions are you using?
Putting facts into a visible form helps reduce the power of fear, greed, and FOMO. It does not remove emotion, but it stops emotion from pretending to be analysis.
The lesson from 2025 was not that intuition is useless. With experience, instinct does matter. But instinct without factual discipline can become expensive quickly.
In investing, emotions often speak first. Facts usually speak more quietly. But in the long run, facts tell the truer story.