I feel much more comfortable investing in a few companies that I feel are strong than investing in a mutual fund that will roughly end up tracking the market as a whole, and invariably ending up with a dangerous bet on the market going up. (unless it's perhaps a fund like FNSAX)
You almost certainly know more about this than I do (I had to google FNSAX), but here's my issue with this strategy:
You don't make money off stocks by investing in strong companies. You make/lose money by investing in companies that do better/worse than expected. Because of this, when you invest in specific stocks, not only do you have to know whether or not the company will do well (not that hard to figure out) but also how this compares to the current expectations for that company (very difficult).
There are tens of thousands of people who are smarter than me and who sit around all day trying to guess whether companies like FB will do better or worse than expected. Unless I'm a genius, there's no point in engaging them in a field where they have all the advantages, inside knowledge, practice, etc. and all I have are guesses. (Though come to think of it FB might be the one exception to this as people on HN may have a better idea of where the world's going than others. Even then you'd have to be willing to hold for years for your strategic "software is eating the world" knowledge to kick in and become more important than the financial people's exquisitely tuned formulas).
