Investing in stocks is like taking a risk that you are unsure of. You can study all about the company that you are going to buy stock in and still it is a risk. You can never predict the future, but you can make a great guess. Study the financials of the company and look into how they run their business. Are there statistics up or down? Then look into what is causing that company to have those statistics. A lot of times picking a good stock can come from a gut feeling and you could actually do better than making an educated decision, but this will be out of pure luck. A lot of the professionals recommend that you buy stocks and hold them for many years to come; I think this is because they don’t want to do much work on their part, just buy it and wait. Mutual funds are a more diverse choice rather than stocks because the mutual funds have a collection of many different companies portfolios. Stocks can be quite fun to buy and sell. You might get so into it that you start watching stock channels and newspapers specifically about the stock market. Retirement will come faster than you realize and making a few really smart investments can make those retirement years easy.