Your strategy sounds like "pick winning stocks"? A strategy which has been show to produce (on average) worse returns than index investing.
Index investing has produced a ~200% return in the past 15 years (from 2007 peak to now). Not sure what you mean by "a chance of seeing a profit in your lifetime".
There's a third strategy of "index minus bullshit stocks" where you would include both INTC and AMD stocks for risk hedging, but would leave out things with questionable sustainability like Uber and Netflix that otherwise made it into the index due to the speculative value.
More or less. Of course, I am advocating to leave out any company where it does not fit this criteria: " are generating a lot of cash and a lot of profits, have a moat/USP/technology advantage, and are at the forefront of where the world is headed in terms of trends, or at least are following a sustainable trend".
On other hand it also avoids Tesla when it inevitably crashes to same ballpark as other automotive companies... No I really believe it is nothing special and will eventually come down.
Kind of the opposite of diversification though. Houses burn down and neighborhoods change, sometimes for the worse. I knew someone that bought a house in 1972 for $70,000 and sold it in 2015 for about $70,000. Real estate is not all roses and candy.
All 20-30 years? Believe it or not, the history of investment spans more than the last 25 years. Also, there are some questions regarding the liquidity of ETFs during a major crash/selling session. It’s possible there could be a feedback loop of selling to deal with cashing out that results in price of the ETF going below net asset value.
Index investing has produced a ~200% return in the past 15 years (from 2007 peak to now). Not sure what you mean by "a chance of seeing a profit in your lifetime".