I feel like conventional wisdom is wrong- it’s better to buy stocks of companies you believe in than it is to go with industry indexes.

Unless you plan to buy a whole market wide etf like VTI, then industry specific and thematic etfs are an inferior strategy of investing than just buying companies you believe in.

Take VGT. VGT has great companies like AAPL, MSFT, etc. it also has a lot of baggage weighing it down. People say “diversification” but in this instance it feels all the junk at the bottom isn’t worth having money in. The likelihood any of these small stocks revolutionizing the market is small.

For industry exposure, a portfolio of AAPL, MSFT, ADBE, NVDA, AMD, PYPL, and INTC for example is better than buying VGT.