in the mean time. What is your goal? The last advice I gave was to my Mom to buy Apple at $13.

You say long term, but for what. Do you have a lot of cash that you want to protect from inflation? Are you looking to live off of it after retirement? Are you talking about an IRA?

"long term" isn't a goal in itself. Most people who enter the market try to have a varied approach.

Your best bet is to talk to a financial advisor. Kids, college, and mortgage might impact your choices. If you're young and single, I suppose blue chips are a good way to set it and forget it.

You would have to do a lot of research to catch the next juggernaut in its early stages, though.

I have a few apps on my phone for investment. I thought that was a good way to dip my toes in the financial pools.

The first one is Acorns. The general way it works is you choose your risk tolerance, hook up a bank/credit card and for every amount you spend, it rounds up to the nearest dollar and deposits it for you. So spend $8.47 on lunch, $0.53 is invested. You can also have it invest the spare change plus a dollar or two, etc. so you save $1.53 or $2.53. I won't go into all the functionality. You invest in ETFs, which I gather are similar to mutual funds except ETFs trade during the day whereas mutual funds at the end. It adds up pretty quickly. It's still doing well under Trump, but the graph of my performance is interesting. Under Obama it was a fairly smooth parabola then Trump got in, and the graph now resembles a jagged mountain range.

Second one is Stash. This allows you more control over your investment, which is also in ETFs, but you can choose the type of investments you want to make. So I've invested in "portfolios" such as Equality Works (companies that support LGBT), Clean & Green (clean energies), Aggressive Mix (which is a blend of stocks and bonds that are for an aggressive investor), and Corporate Cannabis (exactly what it sounds like). Plus several others. Fifteen in all, which might be too much. You can read about what these groups do, what companies they invest in the most, see what kind of risk tolerance they are, and see past performances. You can either have an amount deducted from your bank each week for each group (I do $5 each), do it like Acorns with rounding, and maybe a combination. Not sure. They also have more traditional individual stocks you can invest in like Yahoo, Target, Best Buy, etc.

I'm an aggressive investor (was told by a financial counselor that there's never been a 12-year period where at the end the stock market wasn't higher than at the beginning so you might as well be aggressive when you're younger - that's another thing - talk to a financial person), but you should have a smattering of different risk tolerance portfolios. A few of mine - like Blue Chips - are no better than savings accounts, earning just a little.

If you do Stash, the one portfolio I would say get and maybe invest more money than the others is, "Roll with Buffett." You're buying shares of his holding company. Normally, it performs at 10% or better, but Trump ruins everything, and it's currently around 5.37%. My most volatile portfolio is the Corporate Cannabis one. I started investing in it when it wasn't doing well, but I believe in the future of medical marijuana and hemp. I went from being $50 under to around $150 over then back to $40 under and am now at $60 over.

Even if you go more traditional routes, these aren't a bad side-thing to throw some spare change at.

TlalocW

I did well with utilities although there has been a slowdown the last couple of years. Growth has slowed, but the dividends are still decent.

active fund managers can beat them over the long term. If someone who is paid big money to pick stocks can't beat an index fund, what chance do I have?

Also I don't like individual stocks because they are far more volatile than mutual funds / ETFs, managed or passive (mutual funds and ETFs, being a grouping of 30 or more stocks typically, are less volatile because of the law of averages). The funds are plenty volatile as it is, I don't need or want a lot of financial excitement in my life, nor do I want a lot of extra book-keeping.

Edited to add: and with a broad-based index fund, S&P 500 index fund or total stock market index fund as examples, buy and hold is recommended way to go because so few people are good at timing the market. So the recommended course is also the easiest course, and most tax efficient, and the one that is free of cognitive biases and errors.

On the other hand, buy and hold is not a good strategy for most individual stocks, so it's a pain in the ass after awhile to closely watch each company. And making a bunch of buy and sell decisions is likely not to turn out well for most people due to emotional and cognitive biases.

Another way to help your financial situation is to get out of debt. There are apps out there like Acorn that also does the round-up and then when you reach a certain amount will send it to whomever you owe. There are some that you can hook up to any bill you want to pay off, but I have a specific one for paying off my student loan. My monthly payment is 67.25, but I hit the threshold of $100 (at which point it sends the money) twice a month so I'm paying $267.25 more or less painlessly, which is right at 4 payments a month, but I have it set at a pretty aggressive level as well.

Once you've got stuff paid off, you can invest more.

TlalocW

use a low-fee mutual fund or an index fund that invests in stocks. This gives you some diversification, which is important. After you build up some confidence, you might consider individual stocks. But do your own research (e.g. go to your library and study Value Line stock reports), don't ask the internet for advice.

Vanguard has extremely low fees. And there is little evidence anyone can do better than chance picking one stock rather than another so an index fund is fine. More than 50% of CPAs recommended Vanguard index funds. An ETF might be even better but I don’t know much about them.