If it's in a sector you know/have intuitions about--including an employer--some individual stocks (not all in) may not be terrible bets. I've been pretty lucky especially over the past 15 years or so and I cleaned out stocks not going anywhere and farmed out at least of some of the big winners to somewhere that made sense from both an investment and tax perspective.

> Yeah, but did you know which ones from the start?

You don't, you can't.

You pick the best ones, many won't give you much return or even a loss, but sometimes you get a 100x. My best return was over 3000x, those are the ones that make up for all the losses.