Why not leave it to the experts?

Interesting discussion. My 2 cents are as follows:
In my humble opinion, there are two basic criteria for leaving it to experts:

1. When you are super rich (according to me over 100 crores of Networth). And you are rich because of your inheritance, windfall gains etc but not by your own effort. Then better leave your money with expert in reputed PMS firm or MF Manager because they will protect the capital atleast. Otherwise these categories of rich people will ruin themselves financially while investing.

2. When you don’t have time or passion to do study, analyze, keeping notes, collecting and analyzing juggling with historical facts. Then better leave your capital with experts in MF industry because atleast they will protect capital and provide inflation/FD beating return in the long term (atleast 10 years)

Otherwise, it is extremely rewarding for retail investor to invest directly in equities provided he has spent alteast a decade of time in reading, observing, analyzing market and industry data before deploying significant networth in equities directly. The investing in equities has to progress in gradual fashion from bank savings to FD to PPF/NSC to Mutual fund and finally to direct equities. These are my learning. If someone tries to become over smart and in lookout for quick money in short time either way he will be wiped out mercilessly.

Now coming to advantage of direct equities is that if you reach a respectable capital to invest say 1 crore then making 10-15% will add you one year of yearly expense equivalent. And once your corpus start gaining momentum then in 5-6 years time you can double your AUM easily without taking much risk. Later then you will start adding atleast 25-30 lakh per annum (with conservative 12%-15% gain) in your AUM which will put you in a very comfortable situation financially. Later the key aspect would be to avoid taking unnecessary risks and play it safe and result will be taken care automatically and perpetually.

Please Note: Direct investing requires lot of hard work, study, understanding, analyzing various sectors, market data, look out for potential risks and finally great deal of asset allocation understanding across equities and debt instruments. There is nothing like buy and forget kind of scenario if the significant newtorth (e.g. 70%-80%) is invested in equities. Risks need to be monitored periodically. Are you really prepared for that? If not then better do index investing and nothing else according to me.