There are multitudes of ways to make money on the stock market.  You can go with long term stock picks or you can decide to do day trading.  You can try the traditional methods of buying and selling or you can do the reverse of selling first and then buying.  This is called shorting stocks which means you sell stocks which you currently don’t own but hope to buy a little later for a profit.  Or at least that’s the plan.  You can also play with options, warrants, foreign exchange and so much more.  There are just so many ways to make money on the stock market and the surface has not even been scratched.

All that being said, while there is a lot of money to be made, there are also a lot of risks involved as well.  Look at what happened on Wall Street when institutional investors got too cute with their investment vehicles and forgot to mitigate the risks.  They lost billions of dollars.  Oh the other hand, look at how the richest investor in the world made his money.  Warren Buffett made his money by being a simple buy and hold investor.

Since Buffett is a Benjamin Graham disciple, you know Buffett follows the rules from the Father of Value investing by buying shares of companies that have a good margin of safety.  In essence, what this means is that Buffett buys companies whose shares are trading below their intrinsic value.  For most people, this seems obvious as you want to buy low and sell high but this is easier said than done.  Most people don’t know what the intrinsic value of a company is because they don’t understand the business and they don’t bother understanding it either.  Rarely will individual investors even glance at the annual reports or financial statements of the company prior to making their investment decision.

So if you want to make money through the stock market, forget about the day trading and the other distractions.  If we take the greatest investor in the world as an example, all you need to pick winning stock picks is to do your due diligence by doing research.