The thing about investing in individual companies is that you're not betting on whether that company will grow or not. You're betting on whether the company will grow more than investment professionals expect it to.
I have, consistently (over 10 years) invested in individual companies and beat the market, but I found that it just wasn't worth the time. So now I put my money in index funds.
By the way: the biggest predictor of your returns is not which individual stocks you invest in, but your asset allocation-i.e., the percent of your money that's in stocks, bonds, etc. If you want to invest I would first learn about asset allocation before trying to pick individual companies.
I'd say the advantage the individual investor has over the investment professional, is that the professional has a time-frame of 1-3 years. So a lot of a stock's price reflects how the company is expected to grow/pay out over that period.
If you are willing to take a longer term view, asking what's this company going to be doing in 10-20 years, and how is it priced relative to that, then I think you've got a much better chance to beat the market (see Buffet for example)
You certainly have advantages and disadvantages. I could say a lot about the different situations professionals and individuals are in, and I'd be happy to share any thoughts if you're interested. That said, I'd like to point out two things:
1. Most individuals do consistently worse than the market (so do most mutual funds, actually)
2. Most of Buffett's major successes, especially the early ones, have had nothing to do with his predictions of how a company would perform in the future. They were based on the difference between a company's current assets vs. its current stock price. Eg one of his major successes was in buying shares of Sanborn Map company when Sanborn had assets of $65 per share, but shares only cost $45 each [1].
It's still possible to invest using this method-known as value investing-but it's much harder today. The reason is that information is much more freely available. Eg in the Sanborn example above, it took Buffett a significant amount of research to find Sanborn and to realize that they were undervalued. Today all of that information is available to anyone online.
I have, consistently (over 10 years) invested in individual companies and beat the market, but I found that it just wasn't worth the time. So now I put my money in index funds.
By the way: the biggest predictor of your returns is not which individual stocks you invest in, but your asset allocation-i.e., the percent of your money that's in stocks, bonds, etc. If you want to invest I would first learn about asset allocation before trying to pick individual companies.