The world of "investing" is roughly infinite, but you only need to know one successful way to trade to make money. What most people are looking for is just an idea of where to start. With your workweek your time is relatively limited, but I believe that you could easily make your goal of 10-15% a year in the stock market by devoting just a few hours a week to trading. You can research in the off hours online and even set up your trades during non-market hours. Just do your research and set your buy and sell orders to execute at a certain price and be sure to set stops on newly opened positions. So here is one idea: identify six stocks that trade in volume of at least 1,000,000 shares average daily volume and research them. You can easily research any stock worth trading on Yahoo finance. Choose large, household name type stocks. Identify the trend, then "paper trade" for a week or a month until you get a feel for how the price on each moves. I don't recommend following more than maybe ten or twelve at the most, because it becomes too much to pay attention to. Trying to watch even twenty stocks is way too much to start with. Don't paper trade for more than a month though. After a month you should know if you are interested or not. Also, if you decide to start trading with actual money, know that your behavior will be different from when you were paper trading, because now you will be using real money, and dealing with the factors of greed and fear, which up until now have been absent.
I am not suggesting a daytrading strategy, nor am I recommending a "buy and hold" strategy. More of a swing-trading strategy which would call for a few trades a month and maybe an hour a day of attention to open positions. A word about risk: most people think that if they were to buy, say, $10,000 of a particular stock, that they are risking the whole $10,000, like in a casino. That really isn't an apt comparison. If you were to buy $10,000 of a particular, large-cap, household name stock, what are the chances that the stock price will drop to zero? Pretty small. You can easily limit your risk to ten percent of maximum risk, with good upside potential, buy immediately setting a stop ten percent below your purchase price (or ten percent above your short sale price) Daytraders usually use 2-3% stops but you could easily set your stop to ten percent. So then you are only really risking one thousand dollars on ten thousand dollars "invested" in a large cap stock. Ten thousand dollars invested in a penny stock, however, nearly equals betting the whole ten thousand that the price will go up, because liquidity generally is poor and company financial information is virtually nil. Versus a penny stock, the casino is less risky: blackjack has much better odds than buying a penny stock.
When you feel you are ready, open a brokerage account with
Etrade, then try your hand at trading on your own. I use and recommend Etrade because they are a large and reputable institution, with market capitalization greater than most large banks in the United States. Also, a larger brokerage has access to more stocks, which is important when you are shorting, since you are selling stock that the brokerage borrows from another account. Etrade's fee structure is slightly higher than some other deep discount brokerages, but the difference is negligible and worth it.
I don't think you need to be a professional to make money. I think the average person can be successful trading, because he or she will pay the most attention to his or her own money. Just be cautious and trade large household name stocks with large daily volume traded (Example: Ford). Don't be afraid to sell short. Short selling can be very lucrative, maybe more lucrative than going long, because fear is a stronger emotion than greed. Just be sure and set stops to protect the downside, whether you are short or long. You don't need to trade dozens of stocks either, no more than half a dozen big name companies would be sufficient. Don't fight the trend, follow the trend. The websites Investopedia and Clearstation would be two great places to start learning about trading. Investopedia for easy to understand explanations of topics and Clearstation to identify the trend of a particular stock. In my opinion the two most important criteria for a stock are trend and volume. Trend is the most important and volume is second. Trade in the same direction as the trend (buy stocks that are rising and short those that are falling) and watch for larger price fluctuations when volume rises. Don't pay for market research by signing up with any of the many "research" companies that are all over the internet, both reputable and nonreputable. There is a ton of information available on the internet for free. Yahoo finance is actually a great place for stock information, just don't pay any attention to the message boards on there. There are also a lot of other great sources of information on the internet.
Stay away from stocks that have little information available and trade in small daily volume. They are not sufficiently liquid to be traded efficiently. Stay away from stocks that trade for less than $5, one reason being that you can't short them, and I believe that this distorts their value. Stay away from penny stocks. They are touted by firms that are paid to "recommend" them. Lenders recoup the money they lend these companies by bundling the debt and selling it to the public as penny stocks. You can bet that the lenders take a premium as their reward for lending the money. Buying penny stocks is pretty much like buying lottery tickets. You might get lucky, but it would be just that, luck. It would not be "investing". Stay away from options until you get comfortable with trading the actual stocks themselves. Options trading is not a liquid as trading the actual stocks themselves.
Don't choose a team to be on (Bulls or Bears). Both are just cheerleaders for a particular market direction. Be a bull with a stock that is rising and a bear on a stock that is trending down. Don't pay much attention to what CEO's and other company flacks say. They are also just cheerleaders for their own company. Don't fall in love with a particular stock. Which means that if you think that, say, Toyota is the greatest company to ever walk the face of the earth, and it is clearly trending down, you should short it.
In fact, I believe that it doesn't really matter that much what stock you choose, as long as you can see a clearly defined trend to follow, it trades in large volume, you keep an eye on announcements and any other information which may impact the stock, and watch for trend reversals, which are usually accompanied by a large increase in volume. Trend tells you which way "investors" think stock is heading in the short term, and volume moves the stock price strongly in one direction or another and provides liquidity. The company may be the greatest company ever, but if the investing public thinks differently, the price will drop. So trend doesn't really show what the stock is worth, it shows what the buyers and sellers opinion of the stock has been recently. Also, You don't have to trade every day. The money is not made in the trading, it is made in the waiting.
If you are familiar with REITs that might the best place for you to start looking. What is the trend? Without looking I think that most are trending down right now after a huge run-up in the last five years. If you were to short them or buy options you can't receive the dividend. But short-selling in a downtrend could be very lucrative. If you could short one in a downtrend for say, a month, then buy to cover you could realize a nice profit.
In my opinion, "investing" is a word made up by Wall Street to make the word "speculating" sound more sensible to the average person, particularly after the bad rep that "speculating" got early in the last century. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with speculating. Banks speculate. Mutual funds speculate. Anyone who buys anything in hopes that it will increase in value is speculating. Also, while some diversification is a good thing, and I particularly recommend it for the casual investor, I think too much of it just averages your losses and becomes a de facto "buy and hold" strategy, also known as being an "involuntary investor", where you sell your winners but ride your losers because you don't want to lose money. Sell the losers quick, even if it means a small loss and let the winners run a little. Don't get too greedy though. Know when it is time to take profits. As they say, let the other guy have the last ten percent.
One final thought: trading is very addictive when you are making money, and very demoralizing when you are not. I have had days when it seemed so easy that it felt like taking candy from a baby, and I have also had days when I felt like the baby! But so far this year, my account is up over about 54%, down from an all-time high of 94%.
Let the flames begin!