Stock (equities) Market
The stock market is probably the most well known form of investment, to most people when you say the word investment the first thing they think is the stock market. There is a good reason for this, over the long term stocks will usually give you the best return of any of the major investment options that you have available to you.
Almost everybody is familiar with the stock market, it is one of the most talked about forms of investment that there is. A stock gives a small piece of ownership of a company. As the value of that company grows the value of your stock increases. Of course the opposite can happen as well and you can end up losing money instead. Nevertheless over long time frames the stock market is actually a fairly reliable investment. Certainly there will be some ups and downs over the short term and individual stocks will vary in their success. But on the whole you can usually count on fairly reliable returns on the stock market.
Actually getting those reliable returns depends on making good decisions. It is important to understand that there is a difference between being a stock investor and stock speculator. An investor buys the stocks of quality companies and holds them for long periods of time. He will have a diversified portfolio and he will happily earn a steady return over a period of many years. A speculator will invest in companies that are very volatile and will hope to make a quick short term profit. There are some speculators who do very well however for the most part they will end up losing money.
When it comes to picking stocks there are all kinds of different theories about how to do it. Some of them are tried and true while others are really out there. It is going to be up to you to decide on how to choose the stocks that you are going to buy. There is no right or wrong way to do it. That being said the tried and true approaches got that way for a reason. But if you have success with another method then there is no reason to change your approach.
It is also important that you make sure that you have a plan for selling your stocks. A lot of experts will tell you that when you sell is actually more important than when or what you buy. Despite this most investors will invest in the stock market with no plan for when they are going to sell their stocks. This is a mistake and it will usually lead to losses in the long term. Selling to quickly will cause you to lose any profits to the commissions that you have to pay but holding on too long hopping to hit the absolute top will usually result in holding it on the way down.