I feel so stupid when I come in here. I currently just have my money in mutual funds through 401k and Roth.
Would love to do more of what you all talk about. Where do you even start?
It's not necessarily bad to just have funds. However, you do need to keep fees in mind. A fund with a 2% fee is going to suck $2,000 out of every $100,000 every damn year.
There are plenty of funds/etfs out there with significantly lower fees, and if you don't know better, you are perfectly fine using something like FXAIX with a 0.015% expense ratio. You will PROBABLY beat 95%+ of other funds out there just due to the lower expenses.
Personally, I have put a lot of time and effort into my portfolio over the years. I am very diligent about reporting, making a plan, reviewing the plan and sticking to the plan.
I have made plenty of mistakes over the years, but I have also had a lot of big wins.
Just for perspective, my actively managed portfolio (by me), has beat the S&P 6 of the last 7 years, and on track again this year. That sounds great, but it comes with a caveat, and that is increased risk. Schwab has some pretty neat tools to determine portfolio performance and risk and well, I'm on the outer edge on risk. I can live with that. Others cannot.
This is just my brokerage account mind you. My 401K's and primary IRA are 75%+ Index funds. I still manage those a little bit, but just with blue chips.
Get a feel for your investment goals and risk thresholds. Start an account with what you are comfortable playing around with and go from there.
There are 5,000+ stocks to choose from, so no one can really own them all individually.
And there are now more ETF's than stocks to choose from, so the investing universe is vast and overwhelming. Don't try to research every single stock of fund. Pick a few, and dig into them deeply.
And g'luck