I reckon I got most things right, but as this is specifically "what would you have done differently, what lessons have you learned?" the big one for me is: don't invest in individual stocks, invest in broad (ideally low fee, e.g. passively managed) funds instead. Growing up in an era of privatisation, reading the financial press with all their information on individual companies, seeing all the stock market pundits with their various stock picks, and so on, buying individual stocks just seemed to be "the thing to do". But at the end of the day, unless you spend an enormous amount of time on it, you are very unlikely to be able to out-perform the market. In my case there were many bad investments I could arguably have avoided, e.g. all the dot com stocks I bought on 15 March 2000 and banking stocks I bought on 25 April 2008. But I did buy a lot of BP shares on 15 April 2010 (5 days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion), and I don't think any expert could have foreseen that. Individual stocks are far more of a gamble than funds.
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Let's be honest... research shows that even if you are a trained professional making a career of picking stocks, you STILL probably won't out-perform the market.
I've heard that a lot. Put it on S&P 500. No hedge fund will be able to beat that.
Consider the fact that S&P 500 is made up of 500 companies, there will be a top 100 and a bottom 400. There are some sectors that grow better than others. e.g For the past couple of years the entire Tech sector has done phenomenally well.
I like picking stocks, learning about companies, their products, competition, reading financial statements, P/E ratios and speculating. Its fun!
It does feel like a gamble at times so I do a 50%/50% split. Half goes to a wide index, and the other 50% is split into smaller chunks that goes to stocks I have picked after a lot of reading and thought.
For the past 3 years I've beat the market but 3 years is a very small sample so I may as well very much lying to myself. In anycase I enjoy it.
Individual stocks, to me, is like gambling. With enough knowledge and foresight and luck you can really make a pretty penny.
I like the idea of also investing in funds. AI and professionals are already watching and picking these for you; it feels like investing as well, may have lower returns but typically much safer.
A mix of both seems very healthy and what a lot of able-bodies are doing right now.