My motto is "he who dares" 
I dabbled with a modest investment for around 8 years. For the first two to three it halved then it went back up, then it went down and then it soared. At the end of the 8 years I calculated I'd made an annual 10-11% return, which is what the text books told me it would do. So this was the signal, I then invested a lot more money. In 2008 my portfolio went down 50%
....but I'd learned so waded in with even more investments.
I recently reviewed my portfolio and I would say it's yielded around 10%.
Conclusion.....stocks give consistently the highest returns of any investments, but it's a rollercoaster ride. If you are going to make money, in the process you will crash and burn from time to time. However once you've crashed and recovered, the crashes don't bother you anymore. My portfolio lost 25% last year, but it was so far up on the initial investment it just depressed my annual return. As you go on the money you "lose" will have been generated by the stock market so it doesn't matter, and in any case as it always does, it recovers.
If you do this it is a good idea to go and learn the fundamentals, be able to analyse the annual statements i.e. balance sheets, understand key ratios so you know it's a well valued stock, and then you can't really go wrong, learn how to build a well balanced portfolio. You need a source to give you investment ideas. There are plenty of sources, investor mags you can read.
If you follow an index tracker or build a portfolio from leading blue chip companies in the index (preferable in my view, because you can cut out the dogs) you can make a reasonable return without having to do anything.
Generally start with a small portfolio and build up slowly over time; If you hold money back a crash isn't traumatic because you know you can simply buy cheap stocks and make an even better return in the long term than if the stock market never crashed at all.
A couple of rules I have, never invest more than 5% in any one stock (10% for a small portfolio) and hold 50% of the value of the portfolio in cash to wade in after a crash. My experience is that a crash is 50% down and a correction is 20-30%.
For those with an adventurous spirit, I do believe there are some reasonably priced stocks on Moscow exchange
I dabbled with a modest investment for around 8 years. For the first two to three it halved then it went back up, then it went down and then it soared. At the end of the 8 years I calculated I'd made an annual 10-11% return, which is what the text books told me it would do. So this was the signal, I then invested a lot more money. In 2008 my portfolio went down 50%
....but I'd learned so waded in with even more investments. I recently reviewed my portfolio and I would say it's yielded around 10%.
Conclusion.....stocks give consistently the highest returns of any investments, but it's a rollercoaster ride. If you are going to make money, in the process you will crash and burn from time to time. However once you've crashed and recovered, the crashes don't bother you anymore. My portfolio lost 25% last year, but it was so far up on the initial investment it just depressed my annual return. As you go on the money you "lose" will have been generated by the stock market so it doesn't matter, and in any case as it always does, it recovers.
If you do this it is a good idea to go and learn the fundamentals, be able to analyse the annual statements i.e. balance sheets, understand key ratios so you know it's a well valued stock, and then you can't really go wrong, learn how to build a well balanced portfolio. You need a source to give you investment ideas. There are plenty of sources, investor mags you can read.
If you follow an index tracker or build a portfolio from leading blue chip companies in the index (preferable in my view, because you can cut out the dogs) you can make a reasonable return without having to do anything.
Generally start with a small portfolio and build up slowly over time; If you hold money back a crash isn't traumatic because you know you can simply buy cheap stocks and make an even better return in the long term than if the stock market never crashed at all.
A couple of rules I have, never invest more than 5% in any one stock (10% for a small portfolio) and hold 50% of the value of the portfolio in cash to wade in after a crash. My experience is that a crash is 50% down and a correction is 20-30%.
For those with an adventurous spirit, I do believe there are some reasonably priced stocks on Moscow exchange
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