2008 taught me a few lessons about how to understand the present and look at the future.

I hope that everyone feels as I do, that the holiday season was a great opportunity to relax and reflect on what has been a wild (and tough) year ... particularly the last 3 months of it. I think we're all a bit shell-shocked, so it's been nice for me to have an opportunity over the past two weeks to step back, clear out some work and recharge my batteries. 

Looking forward, I'm excited about our Inside ETFs conference, coming up in just over a week now. That feels like a springboard to getting back to business, maybe not "as usual," but in the slightly altered version of the financial world we're living in now.

So what are my takeaways from 2008? Here they are, in the form of my resolutions for 2009:

1. I will come up with a solid asset-allocation-focused investment plan and stick to it through thick and thin. I've mainly done this, though 2008 clearly put me to the test.
   
   
2. I will resist the temptation to dive into opportunities (and there have been many of late). I know that mainly this becomes an exercise in ulcer-growth, trying to catch falling knives or ride the serpent of greed.
   
   
3. I will increasingly use ETFs in my portfolios. For all the criticism the industry has had, there are a LOT of ETFs I really like, and they're often less expensive and more efficiently run than their mutual fund counterparts.
   
   
4. I will resist the temptation of the micro-focused "small-cap/clean-tech/wound-care ETF," and its brethren. If there's one thing that 2008 taught me, it's that volatility is NOT my friend.
   
   
5. I will be wide awake with respect to credit risk in the market (enough said on this one).
   
   
6. I will put some fixed-income exposure in my portfolio, having turned 40 last year & mainly having resisted bonds over the years. On the flip side, I'll probably scale back into emerging markets and maybe even buy a bit of gold, which I've been out of recently, but which always has a bit of room at the corners of my asset allocation plan.
   
   
7. I will make sure that I understand as much as I can about each fund I buy, including its credit risk, tax issues, how it gets its exposure to markets, and how it trades with respect to its target market.
   
   
8. I will stay indexed. This isn't a hard one for me, as I'm pretty much 100% there.
   
   
9. I will continue to taunt Matt Hougan through the New Year. No reason to change on this one.
   
   
10. I will trust in Bobo, the dart-throwing monkey.

There you have it. TEN resolutions. That's quite a few. But they don't seem like too much to handle. Right?