Anonymous wrote:If you believe that a company on its own will perform better than your mutual fund or etf, then it makes sense to buy it.

This. For example, I'm in a certain tech industry and I'm a customer of a certain public company. I have a good sense if they will do well or not (since I know the industry), so I may want to invest more heavily in that stock compared to the small % I'd have in an index fund.

While wall street analysts are pretty good, they aren't always experts in the industry. In my industry, I know all the offerings pretty well and I know which companies can execute better than others, because I deal with them in my work. It's not insider information, just industry knowledge.

If you believe that a company on its own will perform better than your mutual fund or etf, then it makes sense to buy it.

Just buy the top 5 funds in the ETF and save yourself the expense ratio

Most people who invest in individual stocks also invest a sizeable portion of their stock portfolio in index funds/etfs. You choose individual stocks to 'overweight' that position in your portfolio--so if, based on your research, you think a stock will perform better than average you buy it to have more of its growth potential (or dividend) in your portfolio. If you are choosing relatively safe bets with low volatility you could have 5-10 stocks, but if you're investing in higher growth stocks it's better to diversify among 25+ as there are more likely to be losers than winners, but 1 big winner could make up for them all (e.g., you can only lose 100% of your investment in a given stock at worst, but a winning stock could grow by 10x+).

No need unless you have a company you are really interested in and want to follow. It’s also fun to create your own 5-10 stock portfolio and see how you do versus the market.

Well, your fav company stock is probably 0.2% of VTSAX. If you buy individucal stock, you get 100% of that company.

Do you need to buy individual stocks if you already invest in the popular index funds such as VT or FNILX?

Why would you need to by individual stocks of say, Disney, as presumably it would be part of the index fund anyway?

thanks!