LogFAQs > #950215758

So I know there's a bunch of you in this topic that this is a hobby, so you get personal enjoyment out of the time spent and there's the thrill of "hitting it big". I also get the sense that, at least here, people are only playing with money they could afford to lose.

My question then, is, compared to just putting your money in a broad market index fund, how much more (or less) money do you think you've made trading individual stocks?

Or, to put it another way, here's my performance in my non-retirement account over the last 5 years, invested 100% in broad market mutual funds using dollar cost averaging to put in a certain amount of money every week. My beginning balance was around $150k. I made around $77k of purchases. I have around $115k of investment return (site says ~10% rate of return), for an ending balance of around $342k.

Given those numbers, do you feel I've made a good return? In the same scenario, do you feel like you could have done better getting more personally involved buying individual stocks?

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