Even, or especially, without all your experience and expertise, I tried picking individual stocks once as a $25k experiment. It was very eye opening. One of the stocks, BoA, which I picked for its then high dividend stopped paying dividends and crashed 90%. Thankfully, I managed to salvage more than the $25k original stake after a few years, but my returns were several percentage points per year below the S&P 500 total return.

That taught me very clearly that I can't and shouldn't try to pick individual stocks. I simply don't have the knowledge, expertise, experience, data, and analyst support that the pros have. That means that when I buy, I'm making a sucker's bet that I know better than the seller. Yeah, no!