Until you can make signifcantly more money off the returns of a broad index fund vs. your near future salary, it's not worth the labor to try to beat the most w

Until you can make signifcantly more money off the returns of a broad index fund vs. your near future salary, it's not worth the labor to try to beat the most well capitalized and skilled finance firms in the world in the stock market. So if you can make 250k/yr and you get a %5 net return from an index fund, it's not worth it to play stock investor until you have $5mm in the bank. So if you have $300k in the bank, the constant hours of life, labor and anxiety might get you +%5 more return than usual (doubtful) and you've spent a huge amount of hours to make an extra $15k that year. It usually ends up less than minimum wage and you were better off just doing contract programming work on the side. And the reason why the stock market is inflated like crazy is because central governments of the world have been printing money like crazy with QE everywhere, and it has to go somewhere... Just buy an index fund, your going to have a relatively large amount of apple stock indirectly as a result anyway.