[yakers]

Its interesting that there really are different ways to succeed financially. Some people do real estate, some open their own business some live cheaply and save mightily. I had a Quick & Reily trading account which I closed because it was taking too much time and the trading costs were too much even though I really minimized them. My overall financial plan is based on owning my home, a govt pension, TSP(401k type) account, an old IRA, a Roth IRA, a very few $ in ibonds and several DRIP stocks. These are low or no fee DRIPs. The nice thing about the DRIP approach is that you cannot market time. For me it is a monthly DCA into 6 stocks, $50 or $100 a month. One (BWA) I owned for 5 years and the others 3 years or so. A simple chart of these stocks (BWA, WEC, UST, MOD, HNZ, KEY) show a pretty good record over that time VS the S&P. But the basis of selecting a company is not just a recent quarterly report. Dollar cost averaging takes a lot of excitement out of the process and these are pretty boring stocks.
But rather than looking for the 10 bagger why not just get boring old stocks that only slightly outperform the S&P500? And holding individual stocks lets me have different tax strategies, I could tax harvest if I had losses and there is a good tax rate on dividends. I expect to retire in the next year or two and I expect to then stop reinvesting dividends and just use them as part of my cash flow. If I never sell the stocks will pass on to heirs on a current market value basis.
But I don't see the big boys (Bernstien, Swedroe, Bogle) address this approach. Its not really trading but it is investing. Anyway, in my plan there is a place for individual stocks even if I agree that trading stocks is a fools game.