Burton Malkiel (author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street"), the guy who popularized index investing, doesn't condemn individual stock picking. He is fine with it, and he does it himself, provided you have a pool of safer investments in index funds to back you up in case you fail. Which is basically what I'm recommending.

Reference: watch the video at http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/535789/Burton-M...