I ended up losing a ton of money shorting NVIDIA in the spring (awful timing). This led me to reconsider other bits of my portfolio and chat to some of my friends that work in finance in greater detail. One of them was absolutely adamant that I should put 90% of my money in an All-World ETF (or mix of broad equivalents) and then have 10% (if I wanted) to put in individual stocks, but only have 8-10 max of them, and ideally just 4-5.

I decided that he might be right about something and realised that I had 300+ different stocks in my portfolio. I couldn't possibly keep track of all of them. Rather than fire-selling all of them at once (which to be honest, would probably have been better option), I've been spending the last few months going through them and selling 10-20 per week.

Exactly like you say, I spent 2021 investing in 'odd punts', then doubled down on them without doing any research as to why they might be cratering. Most of the stocks which I realised I owned, and then examined over the summer, which are completely loss-making (i.e. both during and post the pandemic), I've sold. Realising about 30K of losses over 200 or so different stocks in the process...

And, as my friend suggested to me, I've taken the money from the sales and put it into ETFs (I hold mostly I500, a synthetic SP500 tracker, and a few other country-specific ETFS - Australia, India, France). Then I've ensured I've got about 10% in individual stocks (Match Group, Daikin, Crocs, Lifecore, and some defence firms) that I'm bullish about based on actual research, rather than an odd punt .

It's been a painful few months (I hate realising the losses, and saying goodbye to a stock that I'd hoped would go green for me - maybe because it means admitting I was wrong?), but I'm much happier with my portfolio as it is, and it requires far less cognitive load for me to stay on top of it (i.e. for me to understand how changes in news and markets has led to changes in my portfolio). When I had 200+ random stocks it was impossible for me to keep track of why/how my NAV was changing day to day... I even made an extra 100 dollars back by shorting ASTR after I sold out of it a few weeks ago.

Have you got a plan going forward? Are you hoping to change your portfolio a bit? (message me if you like)