NephthysWanderer the Charming wrote:
Don't guess. Look for mutual funds and let the pros do it. Invest heavily in the high risk areas since you are young.
The stock market is worse than Vegas.
Only if you define "worse" as "pretty much guaranteed to make you money over time"...
Your advice is basically backwards. You want to invest in relatively safe stuff when you're young. You've got time to let the safe investments grow. That's not to say you can't invest in some specific stocks that you think might be big payoffs, but it's a smart bet to put investment money into long term mutual funds.
Find a stock ticker site on the internet (there's a zillion of them). Even taking a broad example like overall
growth in DJI, you can take any two points that are 40 years or so apart and see a dramatic increase in value. It really doesn't matter which two points you use either. You *will* gain a significant return on your investment over time.
For the most part, unless a stock literally goes belly up, it'll be worth more in the long term then it was when you bought it.