Key insights
- An individual investor outperformed the S&P 500 significantly in the past year due to successful bets on chip stocks, data centers, and defense stocks. The investor is now contemplating whether to continue active stock picking or switch to a passive ETF strategy. While this is an individual's experience, it reflects the broader market trends where specific sectors have driven outperformance, and highlights the ongoing debate between active and passive investment strategies.
It hurts because I’m still 30% down overall due to a reckless gamble at the start of my journey. It still stings, and often makes me think how I should’ve never picked stocks at all and just stuck to an all-world etf like I had originally planned.
But then I see how I’ve smashed the S&P500 this year. Big wins include chips (e.g Micron @$90), data centres, and war stocks (I saw the writing on the wall after the 12-day war last year). It’s hard to call these results luck, as I researched a lot. And even then, I didn’t pour all my capital into those big winners, it was just a fraction of what I put into “safer” stocks like Amazon and Google.
Now I’m torn over whether I should continue picking stocks given my improvement, or take my lifeline to dig myself out of the hole I made at the beginning by playing it safe from here on.
Any advice?