After eight years of buying individual stocks in Vietnam, I still can't decide if my portfolio would have done better in an index fund. I beat the VN-Index in 2021 by 14 percentage points, then gave most of it back in 2022 when I held onto a bank stock through a 40% drawdown. Friends who just bought a VN30 ETF tracker tell me I'm wasting weekends reading annual reports for returns they get sitting still — but I'm not sure their math holds once you adjust for the years I actually did outperform.