Ann: Final Results for the year ended 30 June 2022, page-105

This is exactly how I see it. It's like Matthew Mcconaughey's character on wolf of wall street. It's all smoke and mirrors - those rich men (women?- Hi Cathy) - talking rubbish and wanting your money. I think a lot of it is laziness. Older folks want to set and forget with their money, and probably don't care about reading the details as long as they are getting their income.

For myself, I am about 80% indexed. Most of that is VTS, but there is some diversification (if you want to call it that) into other sectors - global banks, AUS banks, etc. This is me not wanting to pick stocks, but picking a few sectors. So far the returns of those have been worse (net) to the VTS. Fine.
I am then about 20% equities that I pick myself. I'm way down in the red, when compared to the ETFs. Why do I do it? Honestly it's fun. I enjoy reading about companies and trying my luck. Is this just gambling not investing? probably - but I'm fine with that. To me this is more fun than horses and I'm not betting anything I can't lose (I'm 40yrs old).

As part of my stock picks I own MFG, PTM and a few others. I hold those just on the fundamentals like any other company. I'm in the red for both too . Why do I own these when I think that active managers are crap? The fact that I would not invest my money with them does not mean I don't think other people will invest with them. On paper these companies (not their funds) look to be good value. But as I said I'm in the red so who knows. The idea is pretty much summed up like this - I won't invest with you, but I hope others are stupid enough to do so, so I can get returns from the company.