But successful stock investing is a numbers game. The more rocks you turn over, the better your chances of finding a winner. One way to test them out is to practice. Follow these investments for a while, it'll build up your confidence and give you a sense of how you'd react to market ups and downs. And think about your expectations for your mutual funds.
Funds are collections of individual companies.
A fund might own stocks in 200 or more companies, but they still portray the characteristics of the group. Your expectations of a growth and income fund should be completely different from your expectations of a technology fund. As you build your portfolio, I would suggest that you classify your picks and put them in groups. You might start with large, medium and small, then very small, and also start-ups that might have no earnings. Then decide how your expectations jibe with the growth characteristics that these stocks have historically exhibited.