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Index funds always better than picking individual stocks

For last couple of years, I had been beating myself up for not buying Apple (AAPL) stock.  As a management consultant I should have anticipated that people will go nuts wasting their money on iPads and iPhones.  Instead, I kept my money in XLK and QQQQ, index funds that track technology stocks.  The stock kept rising and I kept getting depressed for blowing the chance, until now when I heard that after the sales cooled off, investors dumped the stock and people lost a lot of money.  Yet again, a reminder that it is so hard for individual investors to accurately figure out the best time to enter and exit a stock.  The best thing to do is to invest in a basket of stocks.  So yes, the downward pressure on Apple did impact index funds, but not as much.