For long-term growth investments, I buy stock in companies that make products that I use and love. i.e. Coca-cola, General Motors, Apple, etc...
For income, I put a portion into high-dividend stocks, and either draw the dividend or trade them away pre-dividend for more than the dividend would have paid... re-buying later after the price drops post-dividend.
For short-term money trades, I look for depressed stocks with what I call rebound-potential... e.g. something like bad news or earnings miss can depress a stock 5-20% depending on the day/mood of the market, I buy and hold some of these I think have a potential rebound in a moderately short-term ( say a week or 2 ), for a modest profit.
The main thing is to stay diversified, and always keep some cash available to buy a potential dip, you cannot have all of your money in 2 or 3 stocks and expect to do well unless you're extremely lucky, and just like in Las Vegas, luck doesn't always go your way. The more and different stocks that you hold, the easier it is to sell a winner, and re-invest that profit in the next.
Also, you need to be able to hold through the short-term market flux, and not sell out of fear... i.e. kim jong shooting fireworks over Japan can shake the market temporarily, you need to be able to hold steady until the market recovers, and even better, buy the dip.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted, you speak the truth. I myself didn't participate beyond a cursory download and trial years ago, because I perceived it too risky and fad-like for my time... boy was I wrong :/
Previous to this I did sha256, and I have to say that the Keccak algorithm was a bit easier to reason about ( as to what it was doing at the bit level, and why )...at least it was for me.
I just don't understand all the JavaScript hate. I've used languages like java and python, basic and pascal, c, c++, assembly, and for the past 15 years JavaScript... I can say without hesitation, that it is my favorite language... I have a hard time explaining exactly why that is... sort of like trying to explain why chocolate is my favorite desert, I mean I like all kinds of ice cream, but chocolate is my favorite.
I think the gist of this whole discussion ( at least the OMG WHY?!?! ) part, can be easily explained by an excerpt from your example comment that sums up in a nutshell the all too pervasive mindset I've seen over the years:
"...LOC is pretty much irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the module is one line or hundreds. It's all about containing complexity. Think of node modules as lego blocks. You don't necessarily care about the details of how it's made. All you need to know is how to use the lego blocks to build your lego castle. By making small focused modules you can easily build large complex systems without having to know every single detail of how everything works..."
By LOC he's referencing 'ye ole Lines of Code paradigm, and trying to make the point that in the end it just doesn't measure up to the prime directive of "containing complexity".
... and that's where I beg to differ.
What I think is being completely overlooked here is the net cost of abstracting away all that complexity... It's performance.
Every extra line of code, extraneous function call, unnecessary abstraction ( I'm looking at you promise ), every lazy inclusion of an entire library for the use of a shortcut to document.getElementById -- these all add unnecessary costs from the network down to the cpu.
And who pays these costs?
The end users of your slow, memory hogging, less-than-ideal set of instructions to the cpu that you call an application... but hey, it's easier for you, so there's that.
For income, I put a portion into high-dividend stocks, and either draw the dividend or trade them away pre-dividend for more than the dividend would have paid... re-buying later after the price drops post-dividend.
For short-term money trades, I look for depressed stocks with what I call rebound-potential... e.g. something like bad news or earnings miss can depress a stock 5-20% depending on the day/mood of the market, I buy and hold some of these I think have a potential rebound in a moderately short-term ( say a week or 2 ), for a modest profit.
The main thing is to stay diversified, and always keep some cash available to buy a potential dip, you cannot have all of your money in 2 or 3 stocks and expect to do well unless you're extremely lucky, and just like in Las Vegas, luck doesn't always go your way. The more and different stocks that you hold, the easier it is to sell a winner, and re-invest that profit in the next.
Also, you need to be able to hold through the short-term market flux, and not sell out of fear... i.e. kim jong shooting fireworks over Japan can shake the market temporarily, you need to be able to hold steady until the market recovers, and even better, buy the dip.