You do not need to read balance sheets or dig into financials (you can find general info) about nearly all listed stocks on financial websites and message board

You do not need to read balance sheets or dig into financials (you can find general info) about nearly all listed stocks on financial websites and message boards. Then think about your risk profile. If you are relatively risk averse (hoping to beat inflation) then it is more prudent to diversify into some ETFs. Not necessarily the broad market but maybe some macro strategy. I prefer to look at the Risk/Reward profile. More akin to VC investing: I look for 20x based on macro trends or interesting opportunities (scalable growing companies in a huge market). One really basic way of looking at this is something like Baidu and Google. Baidu (BIDU) is the Google of China. The market cap is ~ 25b while GOOG is ~130b. With the growing middle class in China and the sheer market size, it would seem more likely that BIDU would become the size of GOOG rather than go bankrupt. This is just an example, but I have owned BIDU, based on this principle for 4 years (it was under 100 and it recently split 10-1) Another sector where this strategy works is in biotech. I have already commented about a similar investment in ARNA -- feel free to check out my past comments.