I don&#x27;t have time to actively trade so I settled to buy shares in an actively managed mutual fund. I did the same research on the portfolio of the fund as I would have done on individual company stocks - looking at past performance, the makeup of the fund, industry performance, and investor websites. I use Investor&#x27;s Business Daily as a more impartial source, it&#x27;s just numbers without much &quot;insight&quot;.<p>One good thing is that the mutual fund has automatic diversification within a particular industry and if you buy shares in multiple funds you get diversification across multiple industries. Another good thing is that the shares of mutual funds are often $100-200 each while the shares of individual companies (ex. google) can be $700 just for one. Using a &quot;high-tech sector&quot; mutual fund allows me to benefit from the growth of multiple companies (goole, apple, intel, facebook, microsoft, intel, etc.) while not having to own separate shares of each of them.