Expectations

• The best way to invest money is with good information and patience. It's important to study potential investments before making them, so that you know what you're really getting into. It's just as improtant to revisit your investments as time goes on, keeping an eye on trends and new developments. Don't trust your intuition; trust the facts and do the digging it takes to find them. As for patience, there's simply no safe way to make a lot of money fast. If you want to invest your money wisely, you'll be in it for the long haul.
  
  

The Stock Markets

• When you buy stock, you're buying a tiny ownership share in other people's business. Your money helps to fund that business, and if the business thrives, then your tiny share of ownership will increase in value. Stocks can be very lucrative but entail a higher degree of risk and require considerable diligence. You can buy stocks individually or you can buy into any of several kinds of mutual funds, which hold many different stocks and pool the risks and returns among all the members.
  
  

The Bond Markets

• When you buy bonds, you're loaning money to companies or governments with the promise that you will be repaid, with interest, at a specified date in the future. Bonds are safer than stocks and therefore are not as lucrative. In other words, you're more likely to see a return on your investment but it's likely to be a smaller return than you would get if you made wise stock investments.
  
  

Starting a Business

• Many people think of investment as buying into somebody else's business, but one of the classic and oldest forms of investment is to take your own money and start your own business. If you have an idea that you think can fly, and if you're willing to put in some hard work to get it off the ground, then you should consider going into business. It's a very hard way to make a return. Many new businesses fail, not because the economy can't support them --- although that's true in some cases --- but because those entrepreneurs did not understand the fundamentals of their business. If you can crack the nut of what to sell, who to sell it to, where to sell it, and how, and if you can get enough capital to launch the business, you may be able to see the kinds of returns that even the stock market can rarely deliver. What's more is that you'll have the satisfaction of having done it yourself.