invest in an index or mutual funds.
don't bother with the riskier / trickier stuff until you are in your 40s and have some cash you can afford to lose.
remember, your investment should double every 7 years based on a 7% annual return from a generic mutual fund and the associated compounding interest.
so if you invested that 30k today at the age of 34, it would grow to...
at 41 - 60k
48 - 120k
55 - 240k
62 - 480k
smartest thing you can do is get a nice 7% return every year (sure it fluctuates, one year you'll lose 5%, the next year you'll make 15% - in the long run though it all averages out to about 7% a year) and just let it double every 7 years.
you shouldn't be doing the riskier stuff until you have a nice mutual fund put together. once you have that, then you can start buying speculative stocks and taking a crack at getting that 50% return kind of thing.
oh and like i told iqqi - there are no easy fixes despite what you might think. the best investment youll ever make is in your education. get a good job so that you can make enough money to have disposable income to invest. most of the 'rich' people in the world didn't become rich using some miraculous investment strategy - most of them got rich by making money through working, then living beneath their means so that they had even more free money to invest, and then investing that money in things that provide a solid, slow but consistent return. i forget the stat, but something like 80% of the millionaires in the world are over 60. most 'rich' people got that way by making wise choices over the course of their life.
basically the type of strategy that warren buffet uses. his advice is to buy blue chip stocks and just hold them forever. which is very similar to buying mutual funds or an index fund.
but trust me, there are no 'safe' get rich quick investment strategies. when you try to 'beat' the market (ie. beat hte index funds) investing quickly turns in to what i'd call 'gambling'. you can spend a lot of time and effort trying to find the 'right' stocks to pick, but ultimately its a crap shoot because the information you REALLY need to to make a good sound judgement on the company, isn't released publicly - hence why stocks jump and crash on a quarterly basis when companies release information on whether they met their targets or not.
moreover, that 'insight' info you have on a stock is often not as insightful as you think and is well known by the investment houses, and as such is already built into the price of the stock. so you might invest in a stock thinking 'ya, I know when microsoft releases the new xbox 360 game that sales are going to sky rocket, so microsoft is a good investment" but what you don't know is that the stock is priced with that in mind (and even if sales are good, if it doesn't meet expectations, the stock can sink). additionally, with a company like microsoft, one game is a drop in the bucket to their overall business - so you really have to know EVERYTHING about a business to even have a chance at making a half way informed decision about whether it will likely grow more than the market thinks it will (remember, its not good enough to grow at the same pace as the market expects, they ahve to actually do better than people thought they would for their price to go up!) and really, who has the time to do the research required to be making good decisions (and if you do have the time, you should be using that free time to work more and make more money which you can invest into mutual funds
)
so take my advice, gambling is for peopel with money to lose. investing is about long-term slow but solid growth - index funds or mutual funds, your choice. these two investing options were created to make the rich (ie. people with extra money to invest) richer - so use them!
