Risky man. I'm complaining but even professional traders have a hard time performing better in the long term than the broad indexes like dow, nasdaq and S&P500, which good ETFs are mirroring and investing in. You can get lucky with individual stocks, for sure, but it's risky to be 100% in individual stocks. ETFs are composed of many stocks so that the gains outweigh the losses, some are always gaining and losing and they're being shifted around to try to maximize gains and minimize losses. They're managed to minimize risk. Just saying, investing a large percentage into mutual funds or ETFs is the way to ensure you will have gains long-term (unless the market crashes and doesn't recover but that has never happened). Over the course of years, individual stocks are a big gamble and could lose most of their value and never recover, but an ETF or mutual fund WILL grow if it's a good, broad one. Like right now if I sold I'd be out a third of what I put in, but in 5 years I will be way up.
Technically no one is touching your money with ETFs, you own the shares, but the fund is being managed as to which stocks are more prevalent and present in the fund. A really broad, conservative ETF like SPY, which is essentially just the S&P500, is very low risk compared to trying to do it yourself. Long-term, it's very difficult to beat its performance, historically.
I'm also doing 50% in individual stocks, trying to catch my break (American weed stocks). But if you want to make sure that your money grows, it's a really risky play to do a few individual stocks, is all I'm trying to say.