Is stock investing your filltime job, or a side hobby?<p>As a side hobby, does it pay more than doing your main field of work (say programming?)<p>As someone who has spent a few years working a dayjob in finance (but is currently far far away), here is how I play the stock market.<p>1) Work a day job<p>2) Use some of profits from 1 to invest in low cost index funds<p>3) Do not touch any investment no matter what the talking heads may try to convince you to do.<p>Will I get Warren Buffet level returns? Nope. But my money will grow steadily without my intervention.<p>Sure you can outsmart the market. But there are a lot of really smart traders and programmers and robots working against you. Why would I expect to beat them in something I only give a few hours a week to?