Within that average are some good years and some bad years.
The problem is that as an inexperienced investor, you are more likely to have some big losses due to mistakes, which will mean that overall, you will probably lose money, not make money.
If you invested in eBay a year ago, you wouldn't be very happy, because the current price is a little bit below where it was a year ago. If you had invested in eBay four years ago, you would be very happy. But if you had invested in another company four years ago that didn't turn out to be eBay, you would not be happy.
It's very easy to look at a winning stock and say "I should have invested in that". The problem is that you don't look at the losing stocks that looked just as good four years ago. If you could see the future and know which companies would become ebay and which companies would fail, you would be rich. But you can't.
It's not for you.
So, I've been looking at investing in stocks because I'll be moving out of my mom's house soon, and I'd like to have some other source of income (not really sure if that's how stocks work or not). But I suck at stocks. Really bad. Horribly.
What I wanted to ask was:
1.) Could you dumb down stocks a bit for me? I've looked at a lot of websites for stocks and I kind of get it, but . . . you know, not really.
2.) What would be a good company to invest in? I've heard that eBay is pretty good.
