Trying to pick a single start-up that will become “the next Microsoft” or “the next Google” is pretty risky.

Even wildly successful venture capitalists strike out more than half the time.

So what should an individual investor like you do?

The Key to Market-Beating Returns

The key to making money…

Last weekend, my fiancée and I were catching up on old Shark Tank episodes.

We love to watch entrepreneurs pitch their start-up ideas to “Sharks” like Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran.

But after the Sharks said “I’m out!” to some start-ups I was bullish on—and I said “Definite pass!” to…

Every year, the journal Popular Science releases a special list…

It’s a list of the 100 greatest innovations of the year—from bionic arms and pain-free dentistry, to life-saving remedies that could change our world.

As I was browsing through this year’s honorees, one of them caught my eye:

It was…

Last Thursday, a tech start-up called Square (NYSE: SQ) went public.

For investors who got in early, when the company was still young and private, champagne corks should have been flying—

After all, Square’s IPO gave the company a value of nearly $3 billion.

So why the heck were so…

For more than a quarter of a century, General Mills (NYSE: GIS) has been a winning trade:

If you’d invested $10,000 into the company in 1990 and reinvested the dividends, today you’d be sitting on $217,146.

That’s roughly twice what the overall market returned.

Perhaps those market-beating returns shouldn’t come…

The market’s had a great run recently:

Since bottoming out in 2009, the Dow has more than doubled.

To celebrate, Wall Street’s been partying like it’s 1999.

But now the end is in sight.

How do we know?

Because you and all your friends just got invited to the party.

The Chinese stock market has taken investors on a wild ride recently:

In June, the Shanghai Composite Index was sitting at 5,000…

By August, it had dropped to 3,000—a nosedive of 40%.

To recoup their money, Chinese investors are looking to the U.S. markets.

But in an unexpected twist, they’re…

Last Friday, a British entrepreneur named Cliff Dennett put on a well-pressed shirt and blazer, took a deep breath, and sat down for a painful interview.

During the videotaped interrogation, which we’ll link to below, Cliff opens up about why his start-up failed—and why his investors lost all their money.

Bill Gross was once dubbed the “the biggest investor in the world.”

For decades, he managed the $292 billion Pimco Total Return Fund—up until last year, it was largest bond fund on the planet.

If you’re familiar with the complexity of evaluating bond investments—from calculating default risk to forecasting the…

Pop Quiz:  When a company is about to go public, why does it lobby so ferociously to get a top-tier bank like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan to manage its IPO?

Depending on how much you know about IPOs, the answer might surprise you:

It’s not just that these banks…