 Have you ever had $100 in your pocket and thought to yourself, how can I turn this $100 into $200 or $500 or $1,000 or even $10,000? Well, this is the video for you because if you keep that $100 in a bank account, it's only gonna increase by about 0.05% yearly. That means that it would take hundreds or thousands of years to double. So it's important that you put that money to work and by the end of this video, you're gonna know exactly how to do that. Now, everybody out there is gonna have different goals, interests, risk tolerance, time frame, situations, et cetera. So in this video, I'm gonna give you several different options for your investment. You can look at these different investment options and decide which one fits you the best. So first of all, let's talk about individual stocks. These are basically going to be shares of a company that say that you own a very small part of that company. Now I'm gonna break down each of these types of investments into three different categories. Just to make things simple, we're gonna be talking about risk, reward, and difficulty. Risk is gonna have to do with what percentage chance does your $100 investment have of going down to zero or maybe going down to $50, so you end up losing money. Reward is what percentage chance does your investment have of doubling? So how much money would you actually earn from your investment per year? Difficulty is not only how difficult the skill of whatever investment you are trying to get into is, but also how long and how much effort you're gonna have to put into it. So when it comes to investing in individual stocks, they are relatively risky. I'm gonna have to give this one a five out of 10 when it comes to risk. The reason for that is because you never know what the perceived value versus the actual value of the stock is. So if a lot of people are talking about a stock, that could mean that the perceived value is way above or it could mean that not enough people were talking about it in the first place and it's just gonna keep going up, kind of like Tesla did this year. So you never really know whether the hype is in line with reality or whether it's a big bubble and it's gonna pop at some point. So everybody knows about Tesla, how it went up pretty much 10X the last year. It went up about 1,000%. Everybody heard about GameStop that did even better than that. But a lot of people don't hear about companies that went down 100% or more and that happened to quite a few companies this year as well. So when it comes to the reward, especially if you know what you're doing, I'm gonna give this one an eight out of 10. Now when it comes to difficulty, most normal investors are not going to be able to consistently pick stocks correctly. If you do decide to go this route, I highly recommend diversifying, investing in a bunch of different companies that you believe in just to mitigate some of the risk. But overall, I'm gonna give this one a difficulty score of six out of 10. So the overall score when it comes to individual stocks is going to be 19. Now the easiest way to get started investing in individual stocks are pretty much any of the ones on this list, especially if you're a beginner, would be to open an account with Webull. And right now they are offering a really generous free promo for free stocks valued up to $1,800 as long as you put $100 into their account. You can check that out down in the description below. I would say this is one of the easiest apps that you can use when it comes to starting investing. Next on the list, we're gonna be talking about bonds. And they are essentially an IOU that you would get from a company or a government that is trying to raise money. So you might get a bond, for instance, that would pay you back 4% per year, but you have to hold it for at least 10 years. Now, when it comes to risk, this is very, very low risk. And that's a good thing. So I'm gonna give it a score of 10 out of 10. When it comes to reward, not so great. Usually you're only gonna get around 3% to 4% return. And so for that reason, I'm gonna give it 2 out of 10. This can be great if you're somebody who's very close to retirement and you don't wanna take any risk. You put your money in bonds and then you don't have to worry about what the market does. But for younger people, generally speaking, it's best if you take more risk. Now that doesn't mean do crazy things or anything like that. You still wanna take smart risks. But if you're young, it's a good idea to maybe invest in a little bit more risky types of investments, maybe even start your own business. Now, when it comes to difficulty, again, extremely easy to invest in bonds, not hard at all. This one is gonna get a score of nine out of 10. So overall, the score for investing in bonds is going to be 21. And that is great, especially if you're someone who doesn't wanna take any risk. Next on the list, we're gonna be talking about starting your own business, AKA investing in yourself. And I guess you could also include here, investing in a high income skill, something like learning coding, for instance, where you could get paid quite a bit from a company. So when it comes to the risk here, it is relatively high. Most businesses fail depending on what type of business you're trying to get in. You're gonna have somewhere between a 10 to 30% chance of success. And so you'll likely have to start multiple businesses before you finally get into one that's actually successful. You'll probably find more success learning a valuable skill, especially in the beginning and then later on after you've learned some skills, you've gotten some experience, then it's a better time to start a business. But overall, when it comes to risk here, I'm gonna give this one a five out of 10 because yes, it is risky, but at the same time, not learning a skill, not investing in yourself is probably even more risky. But in this particular scenario, starting off with $100, assuming that you don't already have a high income skill and have a lot of experience, starting a business might not be the best possible opportunity for you. Now, when it comes to reward, I'm actually gonna give this one an 11 out of 10. I recently did a video where I basically watched a bunch of Daniel Mack's videos and this is a guy who asks super car owners what they do for a living. And overwhelmingly, it became very obvious that many of them were business owners. So they started their own business and that's how they were able to achieve financial freedom at such an early age. I've also done other videos on this and it's become very obvious to me that especially if you're somebody who wants to retire early, for instance, starting your own business is a good way to go. You don't have to, you can definitely retire early just by getting a good job and then investing your money and cutting your costs. But that's not going to be a great option for everyone. The upside is extremely high when it comes to starting your own business. There's basically no ceiling. Now, when it comes to difficulty, that's where this one is going to kind of suffer a little bit, okay? Starting your own business is very difficult. Despite what all the gurus on YouTube who want you to buy their $2,000 course are going to say, starting a business is very difficult. And even if you have a great opportunity, your chances of success are still probably going to be like 30%. That means there's a 70% chance that you're going to fail. And so it's a good idea to make sure that you have a backup plan, probably learn some kind of skills, start a business on the side while you're working in a job where you're getting experience and you're building your skills. And on top of that, usually you're going to be working on your business for a long period of time and you're going to be either losing money or not making any. Generally speaking, you're going to be losing money for at least three to six months so you need to be prepared for that. So overall, this one is going to get a score of 3.5 out of 10 when it comes to difficulty and the overall score is going to be 19.5. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about cryptocurrency or blockchain. And this is something I've been investing in for a while but I've really gotten into it lately. Now, when it comes to risk, you have to realize here, cryptocurrency is very risky, okay? There's no other way to put it. Cryptocurrency is risky. All these channels on YouTube that are like, oh, if you don't want to take risk, just keep your money in Bitcoin or Ethereum. No, Bitcoin, Ethereum absolutely could go to zero. That's possible that that could happen. There's so many other factors that are outside of our control. Governments could ban Bitcoin. Bitcoin could get totally replaced and nobody really knows what the result or the price would be if any of those things happened. So the risk here is going to be pretty massive. I'm going to give it about a five out of 10 when it comes to risk. So you probably don't want to invest in cryptocurrency if you're someone who doesn't want to take on risk. So if you're very close to retirement, for instance, you're like 65, you're retiring at 67, I wouldn't recommend investing in crypto. However, if you're young, you don't have any obligations like a mortgage to pay and a family to take care of, it's best to take on more risk. I have a friend, for instance, and I tried to get him into investing for years. He wouldn't start investing until I told him about cryptocurrency. For some reason, crypto really excites him and that's what got him into investing. Now, maybe it will turn out well, maybe it won't turn out well, but the fact is that he wouldn't have started investing if it wasn't for cryptocurrency. He wouldn't even be in that mindset. And most people don't start investing until they're in their 30s. So in my opinion, if crypto gets people excited about investing, it's going to be a good thing even if they end up losing a little bit of money. Now, in my opinion, when it comes to risk, it's actually more risky to not invest at least some of your portfolio into cryptocurrency. And the reason for this is because, let's say governments keep on printing money and the entire stock market and the entire financial system in general ends up crashing again just like it did in 2008. Chances are a lot of people are going to take their money out of stocks, et cetera, and put them into cryptocurrency. And it's possible that crypto in some ways could replace the financial markets. I'm not saying whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. All I'm saying is it is a possibility. There is a chance that that happens. And so a lot of people say that you should invest maybe five to 10% of your portfolio into crypto just to hedge your bets against that happening. I personally started off with around five to 10% and of course it grew to take up a substantial amount of my portfolio because it went up so much. So the reward here is absolutely ridiculous. Bitcoin went up 10X in the last year. That's literally 1,000%. There's been other cryptocurrencies that have gone up even more than that, like 40X, 50X, but you also have cryptocurrencies that have spiked, gone up a lot, people bought at the top and then they lost all of their value. So it's important to keep in mind the fundamentals of investing here, which is dollar cost average. So try to put your money in a little bit every month instead of trying to time the market. Diversify your portfolio. So don't put all of your money into like one cryptocurrency. Try to diversify into at least five to 10 of them. And then try to think long-term if you can, long-term investing almost always beats short-term investing. So try to look at cryptos that you really believe are gonna do well in the long run, invest in them and then just like leave it there and forget about it. Even if the market drops, just keep investing more and more. So when it comes to difficulty, this one is a little difficult. You have to really do your research when it comes to cryptocurrencies because a lot of people, for instance, fell for the BitConnect scam a few years ago and BitConnect was basically a pyramid scheme, but a lot of people were absolutely 100% sold on it. So you really do wanna do your research. We're talking about the fundamentals here. You wanna look at who the CEO is, okay? Who is the CEO? What have they done in the past? How did they act? Does the cryptocurrency itself make sense? Do they have a bunch of competitors? How overvalued are they? How undervalued are they? You wanna keep value investing in mind, but at the same time, crypto is one of those markets where hype has a lot to do with it as well. Let's just be honest. So there's a lot to say about cryptocurrency, but overall, I'm gonna give it a difficulty score of seven and so its overall score is 22. Next, we're gonna be talking about day trading and this is day trading, swing trading, penny stock trading, forex, all of these types of short term trading. A lot of people confuse trading with investing and in my opinion, it's not really the same thing at all. And day trading specifically is where you buy a stock for instance and then you need to sell that stock by the end of the day. So you start off with a cash balance of say $10,000 at the beginning of the day and whatever you buy and sell in stocks, you have to liquidate it and turn it into cash by the end of the day. Swing trading is a little bit different. You have a few days to do that. So usually it's like a few days to a week, but overall the big thing here is that you are going to be buying and selling in short time spans. Now there's a lot of disadvantages to this. For one, you have to pay more in taxes. You have to pay short term capital gains tax versus paying long term capital gains, which is a lot less. And study after study has shown that almost all day traders either end up straight up losing money or the few that make money only make slightly more than minimum wage. And I've talked about this before on my channel. If you don't believe me, you can check out some of my other investing videos. I'm not really going to go over it here, but this is a well-known fact. And I actually tried it out myself recently. I did a day trading challenge and things turned out well. But guess what? I've also gone to the casino before, put everything on black playing roulette and things turned out well for me there. Does that mean that it's a viable option for investment? No. So overall day trading is going to get a score of two out of 10 when it comes to risk. Now, when it comes to reward, it does have a very high upside. So you can make quite a bit of money day trading. I'm going to give this one 10 out of 10. The only problem here is day traders on the internet are only going to show you their wins. They're probably not going to show you their losses. And I'm confident in saying that most day traders on YouTube make more money from their YouTube channels and the courses they sell than they do from trading itself. And when it comes to difficulty, getting very good at day trading is extremely difficult and it takes up a lot of time. So it's a skill set. You have to be, first of all, emotionally disciplined, right? So you kind of have to almost treat it like you're a robot. Like you have an exit plan, you have an exit strategy. The moment it gets to that, you need to take profit. Second, a lot of these day trading platforms are very difficult to learn how to use and even more difficult to learn how to use well. Third, you have to spend quite a bit of time day trading. So it's not a passive investment like most of the ones on this list. So in my opinion, if you're a young person who has big goals, big dreams and you have risk tolerance, you're willing to take risk and you've got the time to do it, a much better alternative is just to start your own business. If you start your own business, you're gonna have to learn a lot of skill. It's gonna take a lot of time and it's gonna take quite a bit of risk tolerance just like day trading, but the upside is much higher. So overall, the difficulty here is gonna be two out of 10 and it's gonna get a score of 14. Next on the list is going to be index funds. And this is probably the best overall investment for the average person, all things being equal. So a really easy example of an index fund is you take the top 500 companies in the world, AKA the S&P 500, and then you invest a little bit into each one of those companies. So chances are, you know, they're the best companies in the world, they already have brands, some of the smartest people in the world are working for them. So their value is gonna go up over time. You might have one or two companies here that drop off, but overall their value is gonna go up over time and it's been shown that it does go up around 10%, around 7.1% if you adjust for inflation. So when it comes to risk, you're really not taking much. I would give this one a nine out of 10. Now I will say that I also invest in international index funds, not just the biggest companies here in the United States because I think that a lot of international companies are undervalued and the rest of the world is catching up with the US. That's just my opinion though, I could be totally wrong there. But when you're investing in an index fund, you're basically just investing in entrepreneurs. And I truly do believe in entrepreneurs, they're one of the biggest examples of people who change the world. Now when it comes to reward, index funds have been shown to beat about 99% of normal investors, so people like you and me. And they've also been shown to beat around 85 to 95% of professional investors, so people like hedge fund managers. These hedge fund managers are some of the smartest people in the world, okay? They go to like Stanford, Wharton, et cetera. These people are geniuses with like 160 IQ and not only that, they have access to resources that average people don't. The best technology in the world, the best consultants, et cetera. And yet they're still not able to beat index funds 85 to 95% of the time. And on top of that, they're pretty much spending like 12, 14 hours a day looking into different stocks that they're thinking about investing in. Whereas index funds are pretty much completely passive, they're pretty much 99% passively managed by a computer. So the reward here is relatively high, especially when you compare it to the risk. I'm gonna give it a seven out of 10. Now, when it comes to difficulty, because of the fact that index funds are passively managed, they don't cost very much, right? So a lot of the time you're gonna see index funds either have 0% in fees or if there is a fee, it's like 0.03%. It's pretty much nothing. On top of that, you can set your index fund to automatically reinvest the dividends that it gets and you can have it to where your bank account automatically deposits let's say $500 a month into the fund. So you can pretty much just set it and forget it. You never have to think about investing again and you can spend your time doing things like hanging out with your family, making friends or doing your hobbies. So the difficulty score here, it's not gonna be difficult at all. It's gonna get a nine out of 10. And so the total score is going to be 25. Like I said before, I think index funds, all things being equal, of course for some people it's gonna be different. I think all things being equal index funds are probably the best investment. If there was just one investment that you could invest in for the rest of your life, index funds would be the way to go. Next, we're gonna talk about something very similar to index funds, which is going to be mutual funds. And it's very similar. Basically, you're investing in a ton of different companies. They're diversifying. You know, your dollar cost averaging your money into it. However, mutual funds are going to be actively managed. And because of that, there are going to be some fees that are associated with it. Now, again, studies have shown that index funds do generally speaking outperform mutual funds and on top of that they have less when it comes to fees. So mutual funds are basically just a slightly less good version of index funds. However, you could argue that, you know, if that 85% number is correct, that means there's a 15% chance that your mutual fund might be index funds. And if you find one that you really believe in, you know, you think there's a really smart person who's heading the company or something like that, it could be a better alternative to index funds. So like I said, it's basically a slightly less good version, in my opinion. So when it comes to the risk, I'm going to say it's seven out of 10. When it comes to rewards, 6.5 out of 10. And difficulty, it's going to be eight out of 10. So the total score is 21.5. Still a good investment, just not the best investment in my opinion. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about REITs or real estate investment trusts. So this is basically investing in real estate, very similar to you investing in shares in a company. Right? So instead of buying the entire building, you're investing in a very small percentage of that building, and you're usually investing in, you know, hundreds or thousands of them, right? So a super simple example of this would be, let's say that you give me $100,000 to invest in a building. So I invested in that. And then every single year, I get $10,000 back from that investment. I would give you $9,000 of those dollars back. So about 9%. And then I'd keep $1,000 for myself. This is a really simple example, of course, but I think that's just a way of visualizing it. So when it comes to the risk here, I'm gonna give this one a six out of 10 overall. We've all seen what has happened in the last year with real estate. There are a lot of real estate investment trust companies that have actually gone down the tubes when it comes to their evaluation. And also when it comes to real estate, there's a lot of hidden things that you don't really think about. You know, stuff breaks down, toilets break down, washers break down. You have to replace all of these things. There's lots of other hidden costs. There's things where if the person who's inspecting the building, they don't do a good job, you might end up paying like an extra $10,000 to fix the roof, for instance. The government also has a lot more control over your investments in real estate than they do over your investments in stocks. They can tell you what you can and cannot do. So there's a lot of hidden risks when it comes to investing in real estate. When it comes to reward, I think that you're probably not going to get as good of a consistent reward as you would from index funds. I'm gonna give it a six out of 10. And when it comes to difficulty, relatively easy, although, you know, there is a lot of bad information out there on the internet when it comes to real estate just because people make so much money from it. So I'm gonna give this one a seven out of 10 and that makes the total final score 19. Can be a great opportunity for you, especially if you're someone who's very bullish on real estate and you know a lot about real estate, you can look at the different companies that do REITs and maybe you can tell that one company's better than another. So that is a very basic overview of all of the common investments that you see here on YouTube. Now, you can invest $100 very easily by using Webull, which I have a link down in the description, like I said before. And a lot of these companies are offering really good promos. I think Webull is the best one. And on top of that, I think it's the best brokerage for beginners. Very easy to use, but you still have a lot of functionality and you can invest in almost all of the ones that I mentioned on this list. All you have to do is just hook up your bank account, put $100 in there, they verify your identity and you're good to go. I'm really curious what you guys think about all of these different investments. Let me know what you think down in the description. Did I get some of these right? Did I get them wrong? Was I wrong about the risk, reward, the difficulty, et cetera? And if you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap that like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. And before you leave, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]