Online Investing - Continued"...

The keys to making your online investment program work for you - and not leave you constantly pulling your hair out - is to understand how market forces interact to create an investment outcome.

Professional investors (the lords of Wall Street) are not as concerned with a given company's fortunes one way or another; their approach is to try and guesstimate what the market psychology will create in terms of predicting the average market response to the sum total of events that could theoretically impact the market and a given industry group (or sector) within the market.  Obviously, this is easier said than done and is subject to all sorts of economic theories.  The end result is a market that requires constantly diligence in order to predict with any degree of certainty.

What does that mean to you?

Investing for capital appreciation appears to be the only solution that Wall Street would prefer to offer.  Investing for the sake of acquiring a future stream of income from the investment is a very distant second.

That must mean the only logical play in the public stock markets are for investors seeking long-term appreciation, as the long-term outlook would even out the bumps and potholes along the way, while your investment grows.