ChaharMahal jan. In my MBA class, my finance professor taught us a few things. Everyone I mentioned has an MBA but you don't need that, in order to make money. You are right on both accounts, never investing in individual stocks is not smart at all. First of all here are some rules before you decide to invest in the stock market.
1-Make sure you have no debts. This is obvious but you will be surprised, people do not do the ovious.
2-Make sure you have six months to one year of your annual salary saved up. One thing keeping me afloat is income property and saved income.
3-Make sure you have your liabilities taken care of such as house, car. Once you have all of those check marked off your list, you can think about investing.
When you invest you should
4- You want to spread your investments around so I will have a bulk in real estate but I will also later on add stocks again to it. Put about 10% into commodities as well Gold, Silver etc.
1-Spread it like you mentioned. If you have $10,000 like you said, invest $1,000, and add on to it, do not just do it all at once. That way you can adjust your investment. Here is an excellent article I found on CNN money What is better Mutual Funds or ETF's. Tell me what you think? I will provide the link for you. BTW good finance articles I like to read are from
1-WSJ
2-Forbes
3-CNN Money, just to name a few off the top of my head. This is the main partIf you want to invest a big chunk at once - for example, you're doing a rollover of a 401(k) or an IRA - you're better off with an ETF. By contrast, if you want to invest $200 a month (or you tend to invest sporadically with modest amounts of money), you're probably better off in a regular mutual fund; overall, the fees will be lower
So this is why I am leaning more to a mutual fund, it is the better option for what we were discussing, spreading it around. If you want to invest it all at once, then go with the ETF.[/FONT]
http://money.cnn.com/retirement/guide/investing_ETFs.moneymag/index5.htm