By default, I dump money into low-cost index funds with dividends reinvested. Usually into well-established, suitably diverse indices. S&amp;P 500, FTSE 250 (but not the FTSE 100 - not nearly diverse enough for my liking) and so on. I&#x27;ve got about three times my annual income currently invested; it&#x27;s about 75% indices, and 25% individual companies, and two lumps of gold that I&#x27;ve lost somewhere in my house.<p>I don&#x27;t specifically go researching much in the way of individual stock picks. I don&#x27;t set my criteria and then go looking for companies that meet that criteria; I keep an eye on the news and trends and so forth, and build confidence that a sector (or sometimes a specific company, but that&#x27;s rare) will do well.<p>Some examples; when the UK government made it clear that they will do anything to prop up the UK housebuilding companies (which to my mind was when they started underwriting people&#x27;s mortgages with the &quot;help to buy&quot; scheme) I piled into UK housebuilders, and they&#x27;ve done very well.<p>When I found myself noticing that the dollar seemed awfully cheap a year or so ago, I looked for reasons why (and where it might go next) and I altered my balance of index funds to buy into the US some more (which worked out pretty well).<p>When Nokia started getting grudging good reviews for their phones, I looked into what else they were up to and bought into Nokia right before Microsoft bought their handset business.<p>It hasn&#x27;t all been good; I bought into ARM and IMG, hoping to ride the spread of mobile phones, and while ARM came in like a Viking, I made a loss on IMG (although the gains on ARM far outweighed the loss on IMG). A couple of UK retailers have been very disappointing (although still better than just cash in a bank).<p>I rarely sell. I bought into BP some time after their big spill, anticipating that the run of bad news would slow and they&#x27;d start to recover. As it was, the run of bad news went on and on and on and it looked like they&#x27;d be dealing with it for years. Sold up, put it into a US railroad company (which came on like a viking - another pick based on the idea that as the economy recovered, there would be a renewed global interest in new railroad technology; I picked the sector first, and then went looking for good companies in that sector).