You got my upvote for this one sentence: Trying to &quot;get rich quick&quot; is also an easy way to &quot;get poor quick.&quot;<p>I bought individual stocks, made a lot of money in a short time, then lost it just as quick.  So i moved to leveraged mutual funds.  Made crazy money real quick, than slowly lost it as the market became more volatile.  Then I switched to just plain old index funds.  I make a modest return in comparison to those leveraged funds, but when the market turns, I&#x27;ve lost less than a modest amount, so overall it has proven more profitable.