I spent most of my 20s slightly embarrassed to own only index funds because it felt unambitious. Why not try to find the next great company early? Why not use sector ETFs to tilt toward what's performing?

At 36 I have data to look back on. My brief experiments with individual stocks and sector tilts underperformed VTI + VXUS in 6 out of 7 years. The one year they outperformed, they did so by about 2%. The underperformance in bad years was worse.

I'm done trying to be clever with my investments. The boring global index fund portfolio has won every time I've tested anything against it. The people selling you on something more sophisticated are usually selling something.