I have always been afraid to invest my money into the stock market because of the idea that one has to be a professional to do it properly, or has to have extensive knowledge, or else all will be lost. After investing just for a short period of time, I realized that that is not the case whatsoever. Of course knowing how businesses work and how people think when it comes to the economy and trading helps a lot, but I have found that on a surface level, just observing the graphs, knowing how to screen and find certain stocks, and being patient and level-headed is already good enough. I have only been investing for about a month now, and have already made some profits by just doing a few hours of research on my own. The barrier of entry is not as scary as people think,
Investing usually has a bad connotation due to stories of people losing a lot of money, but that only happens if they do not invest smartly or because of rare stock market crashes. However, I believe that investing your money during our country’s current economical situation is not that bad of an idea. Any money sitting in a savings account will only lose value due to inflation, but assets (stocks) will not lose value, and may instead gain value if done properly. If stocks is too intimidating and “risky” in the eyes of some, it never hurts to invest in the S&P 500 ETFs, as they gain value pretty consistently over time (some outlier years such as last year since 2022 was one of the worst stock market years of all time). After learning about stocks (which is actually quite interesting when you look into it), I will always place a portion of any income into my investing account, because of how fast your money can grow just by owning a few assets.
