Any statistics on how each of those are performing relative to each other.
I've never traded real money,only paper trading freshman year and played a game on MarketWatch where I traded like a monkey and made profits. I also put a prognostic on AAPL when it was in its 52 week's low and on ORCL and the outcome was as I had predicted. Maybe because there was no real money at stake.
Paper money is not real money. You won't act and respond in the same way as if you're dealing with your own cash.
Trading.. well, you'll probably lose your shirt. Investing however is very doable. Start with the stuff you understand well (i.e. probably tech). Why not just put in $5k and see where you end up? Even small amounts can teach you a lot.
Diversification isn't all people make it out to be. As an example: if you had to pick one stock would you be more likely to pick a great tech, mining or industrial stock? If you know tech and you work within tech, the answer will likely be tech.
Also, people have different risk levels. My personal opinion is that you need to make sure that, if you make a bet (by picking a stock) and you win, you win big (at least 15-30% annualised).
The S&P has good averaged annual returns and it's a good idea to invest a decent amount into an S&P fund. But if you pick an individual stock to invest in, you need to do your homework and it needs to be able to outperform the index.
Think George Soros vs Warren Buffet. In the early days, Soros would make massive bets on certain events and/or stocks. He bet his entire fund on the decline of the pound and made a killing. Warren Buffet is much more methodical about investing and gets great returns too. Both great investors, but they probably have different risk levels, different focus areas and different ways of approaching things. And that's one of the things that makes investing fun!
Analysis of this style is going to be tremendously subject to survivorship bias. It's obvious that amongst the biggest winners will be some who took too much risk - with extreme variance the lucky few will wind up winning biggest. But there's no reason I should expect to be so lucky.
Meanwhile, I am most able to put away the most money when tech stocks are doing well, and most likely to have trouble finding work (and possibly need to tap my investments prematurely) in an environment where tech stocks are likely to be at their lowest. "Buy high and sell low" is a poor strategy.
