the "peru" troll again

It's pretty simple really, you just have to sell your stocks for more than you bought them for. What's so complicated about that?

Buy low, sell high, according to valuations, not stock prices alone. Diversify. Keep overhead costs low. Don't assume that a great company must have stock that's also a great investment. Don't automatically buy stocks that magazines say are the ones to buy NOW or are the best for the long run. Ignore CNBC commentators.

Read the Peter Lynch books, One Up On Wall Street and Beating the Street, but don't forget that even Lynch recommends mutual funds over individual stocks for most people. Lynch is a fundamentalist, meaning he believes in digging deeply into the workings of companies to figure how what they're worth as investments, and he says that average people are better at this than Wall Street pros are because they're more in touch with the real economy. Still, check publications like Value Line, the Standard & Poor's Stock Guide, and Morningstar.com for their reports about the companies.

When an author claims to know how to always make money or beat the market, check the person's long term track record with managing real money, meaning a regular mutual fund (not a hedge fund). For example, William O'Neill, who publishes the newspaper Investors Business Daily and wrote How to Make Money in Stocks, ran two funds, and both failed (OK his second, New USA, was merged into another fund, something never done while a fund is highly successful).

orthros said:Buy index funds. From Vanguard. With an appropriate mix of international vs. domestic stocks, large cap vs. small cap, value vs. growth.

Buy them, hold them forever.

Make sure you have enough of a stock/bond split so that you don't panic and sell when the market's down.

Rebalance once a year.

That's pretty much it.

I pretty much agree, although I use ETFs, which are basically the same as index funds. The chances of an individual investor beating the market are pretty slim.