For the longest time, this is pretty much what I believed, and so I never touched the stock market, preferring to invest in other assets. And, depending on how

For the longest time, this is pretty much what I believed, and so I never touched the stock market, preferring to invest in other assets. And, depending on how your investing mindset, it's still true. I was recently introduced to the dividend investing strategy. Basically, you pick big, stable companies with a strong history of paying dividends and increasing them every year, and which are very unlikely to go out of business any time soon. You invest in those stocks over the course of years (using a dollar-cost-averaging strategy or something similar) and set up a dividend reinvestment plan on each. After a few years the dividends should be pretty high and once you decide to end the reinvestment plan and keep the dividends, you have a cashflowing asset. The problem with investing for appreciation is that it's speculation (i.e. gambling). If you're looking for appreciation then index funds are probably your best bet. The strategy above would probably produce a portfolio where the stocks themselves probably won't appreciate more than the market as a whole, but everything I've read about it says that, between a bit of overall appreciation and lots of dividends, you should end up with a pretty massive return on your investment over time. Of course, I haven't actually begun investing in this strategy yet, so my input may not actually be useful -- this is just what I've found in my research lately.