Too broad a question for me to give a succinct answer, so this is going to be a bit all over the place. But I've been investing for myself for about 2 decades, have participated in just about every type of investment, ending up preferring complex options strategies. But I also am a fan of buy-n-hold, and commodities.

The best, first investment you can make is in money and time to get enough understanding and perspective to be able to sense the value of any investment. All advice is static, but perspective is a dynamic benefit.

I strongly recommend reading "Buffetology" by Mary Buffet and "How to invest like warren buffett" by (I think) Timothy Vick.

Then spend time learning economics. Economics in one lesson is available free online, and the Mises institute has regular articles on the state of the economy: http://mises.org

It was from an article on the Mises institute in 2001 that I learned about the housing bubble. Yes, that is two thousand and one. I was well placed to profit when the bubble burst.

Here are some basics though: Buy things that are correctly valued where you have good reason to know they will appreciate. Do not follow the pack. The pack is wrong. The conventional advice is, generally bad advice.

The US economic situation is in dire straights and to keep things going the fed is printing money like never before. This is why people are talking about buying gold. This is pretty much a no-brainer. Inflation is around %20, so by putting cash into gold you have a %20 return on purchasing power. The reason people get confused is that they think that the dollar is a constant, but inflation erods purchasing power and even if it doesn't happen immediately and everywhere it does happen. Gold, and other precious metals are a good hedge against inflation.

I've had good experiences in the past buying REIT type assets, in particular, you can buy Canadian Trusts that pay out a royalty based on the exploitation of mineral or oil or natural gas leases and wells. A good one of these would be one that is growing reserves while still paying a good royalty. Back when I was doing this, I was getting %5-%10 return, on top of stock price appreciation on top of a %5-%10 annualized growth in value due to the dollar slipping against the canadian dollar.

On currencies, generally countries with strong commodities based economies will do well, and countries with economies based on Keynesian "stimulus" spending will do bad. So, if you do hold cash, try to hold it in currencies like the Canadian dollar.

Here's a quick economic lesson: Any government "Stimulus" will do more damage than benefit the economy. The reason for this is the government spends money poorly, but even if they spent it well, the act of spending does damage because they are taking the money out of the economy at the place where it would do the most good for economic growth. Government spending all comes from taxes and inflation. The tax money is taken out of corporate and individual profits-- off of the bottom line-- leaving less money for reinvestment and demand creation, exactly at the point where the demand and jobs are created. Inflation hurts the same way by driving up ongoing expenses reducing profits and causing people to have less money to allocate to expansion. Meanwhile the spending goes to boondoggles that are politically desired and benefit specific politicians and don't generally have a net positive economic return (They talked a lot about roads, but only a tiny fraction went to roads and a lot of that was lost in graft anyway.)

You can buy steady companies that are well run and which trade for less than their net values-- Aflac and Berkeshire Hathaway are two good examples of this. I never bought Apple because, while I am an Apple fan it was outside my area of expertise. I'm an engineer, but I can't predict the fotunes of the tech industry well enough!

IF someone else is going to manage your money, make it be Warren Buffett, not some fund manager on wallstreet. (probably the worse deal in the world is a mutual fund, and this includes index funds that take a percentage of your net worth for "management" that involves just buying stocks that appear on a list. You can buy stocks off of a shopping list yourself.)

It is important to recognize that there is a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of conventional wisdom that has been passed down the generations that started out as stock brokers sales pitches. Much of the industry is aligned around choices that are designed to make the people who peddle stocks, etc wealthy.

BTW, bonds are toast, will be killed by inflation and then when yields have to go up the low yielding bonds we're getting now due to "quantitative easing" are going to crater.

Oh, and read the Letters to Shareholders in the annual Berkshire Hathaway reports. Good advice from the best investor in the country. Buffett wont' advise you to buy commodities, he calls his purchase of silver "a great mistake"-- which it was only because he sold too soon. But he is good for general wisdom, and if you do decide to pick stocks, best to understand as much as you can how he does it.