I remember the elderly Beardtown ladies from a decade or so ago who doubled up on the market most years. They had some investment books and they were big investers in consumer staples. type stocks and funds. ....food, medicine , building materials, paper, clothing toiletry items, soap shampoo toothpaste. just stuff that millions of people use every day. My daughter was in an investment club in her HS a few years back and the business teacher had them do an experiment where they threw darts at a newspaper page of stocks and they tracked those stocks for the school year and it out did the market by a pretty wide margin. I figure a low-cost, diverse index fund will be the best option over time. A few people may be able to squeeze out a slightly better return picking single stocks, but if the wall street pros who do it full time can't do it consistently, most of us probably can't either.Regarding timing the market...
Let's just say I have a little experience in computer programming, statistics, forecasting and data modeling. Predictive analytics is my job.
I've had opportunity to work with VERY expensive data systems (many millions of dollars).
These systems are amazing, powerful. Programmers make $150K to $250K and up. Plus stock...
These systems and their uber programmers and analysts fail at timing the market.
If you think you can, well...