alt Hacker NewsThis is absolutely and unfathomably terrible to such a great degree that I think it reinforces OPs point. It seems like using an LLM has given you the confidence to make an incredibly ill-informed decision that will cost you dearly.
Every single time you rebalance your portfolio, you will need to pay short-term capital gains taxes on any gains, as opposed to an ETF in which you simply pay for the gains when you sell your stock which can be years/decades from now. This alone will reduce your average expected earnings by 20% over a 10 year period eviscerating whatever tiny advantage you think you'll get from saving a few bucks in fees.
Furthermore, assuming you rebalance your portfolio monthly, which is the minimum you need to rebalance in order to remain even somewhat aligned with QQQ, you're basically going to be paying a MINIMUM of 30-40 bucks a month in commissions to Interactive Brokers, or 400 dollars a year. And on top of IBKR's commissions you then need to pay the pass through fees of about 5-10 dollars a month for a total of around 500 bucks a year.
Compare that to QQQ which only costs you 18 dollars a year for every $10000 invested.
I've read some incredibly foolish investment advise on HackerNews, but I think this one just about takes the cake.
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But he avoids SpaceX and Tesla, which I think is probably the driving factor in not using QQQ. Maybe he values that more than $500
IBKR has payment for order flow if you use the Lite service, so it actually wouldn't be $30-40 a month.
You still are paying the capital gains taxes with the ETF, they are just rolled into the management fees.
You can avoid a lot of the short-term capital gains taxes by only rebalancing within certain thresholds and being ok with being "close enough" to QQQ instead of being completely aligned with QQQ.
ETA:
Looked it up, looks like I was wrong about the taxes being rolled into the fees. There's some extra weirdness associated with tax efficiency of ETFs.
I still think some of the numbers the parent provided were a bit handwavey and bullshit, but I'll acknowledge I was mostly wrong in my response.