There is no way to invest (safely) that will pay off soon. At best you're looking at a 5-10 year horizon. Investing is long-term and requires a lot of discipline and security.

I started paying attention to stocks at the beginning of last year with gamestop. Since then I have tried to learn as much as I can from a leftist perspective. I am not an expert but I think I have a good, basic image of how this stuff works.

First you need enough money to invest and not touch. Can you put aside $100 right now and not touch it for 5 years? Does that seem like a crazy idea? If so then you probably don't have the temperament for investing (yet). Now, let's say you can do that. Can you watch its value go down 75% without pulling out? Would that depress you and make you too anxious?

If you have $100 right now and you can do all that stuff above, then you need to realize how restrictive that is. You are automatically locked out of most stocks worth holding long-term. Not all of them, but most. You're locked out because you never, ever want to blow your entire pile of capital on one trade or a single stock. That means even though you have $100 you only want to spend less than 5% of it on a single trade. The more of your money tied up, the more you're risking. Risk management is a huge thing with any investment.

What can you buy with $5? Not much. You're stuck with penny stocks. Penny stocks tend to have larger swings (more risk on top of what you already have!) and don't usually pay off very well. Sure you can go find lottery winners who bought some tech company at $2 and now it's worth $50. But there is no formula for finding those wins. No matter what anyone says, there is no sure thing.

So you buy a $5 stock. A month later it's worth $3. You're diamond hands though, and you're not flinching. Six months later it's $4.50. A year later it's $5 again. Another year after that it's $5.15. The company takes off and makes tons of money, they become an indispensable part of the American Economy (tm). It's now worth $50. You made 10x your money if you sell now.

Was that a good investment? Here's where math comes in. You have to evaluate investments. They use something called present value . Also see Khan Academy for more on this. You calculate a pay-off of an investment and work it backwards to see how much it's worth now.

Example: Say you know for sure that stock will be worth $50 in 5 years and you want to put down $5 now. You need to know the maximum amount you can make on that $5 per year, risk free. People often use the rates of savings account or federal government bonds. You calculate the amount that $5 is worth in 5 years at the current rate. Then you work backwards from $50 and discount it by the same rate for 5 years to the present. If that $50 is worth $10 today, then it's a good investment because you're only paying $5. If you calculate forward that your $5 could be worth $60 in 5 years by leaving it in a savings account, it's a bad investment because you could make more with way less risk by leaving it alone.

The other side of this is that your stonks don't go up, they remain flat or even decline. That's where risk management comes in. You need to have an exit plan should the stock not go where you want. Your trading platform will provide tools to set automatic stops so you don't have to watch it 24/7.

The most realistic thing would be your $5 is worth $8 after $5 years. Yeah you made money but you probably could have made more just working extra shifts. You sell your $8 and use that to buy more of another stock. $8 becomes $12 in another 5 years. Etc. It's a very slow and tedious climb.

You can work this out using a compound interest calculator. . Say you invest $5, you don't add anything to it, and it compounds annually. Set the interest rate at the S&P return average (8% I think?). You'll get an idea of how the growth works. If you want faster growth you need a higher return rate than the S&P which is harder and riskier.

You probably can't afford to touch options and they are about as dangerous as it gets in term of risk. Because they allow you to leverage your money, and most people eventually blow up any gains they initially get. This is where you see the loss porn on r/wsb.

I make it seem so hopeless because you need to understand that investing is for people with money to park their cash and see it slowly grow over time to offset inflation. Even a millionaire's money grows slowly, it's just that they start with so much that instead of making $3 over 5 years they're making $300000 over that time. And they can pay people to manage their risk and pay attention to stonks for them.

You can grow your money as a poor person but it requires capital. You should save as much money as you can right now, especially if you're young. Learn all you can about how capitalist investing works. Get enough starter capital to insulate yourself from risk and then start actually investing.

Take your current paycheck, spend 70% of it to live. Save 30% of it. Take the 30% of savings and split that up into 30%/30%/10%. 30% to stonks, 30% towards property, 30% in other things, 10% in cash.

Example: $100 pay check. $70 to live on, $30 to savings. The $30 in savings gets split. $9 (30% of $30) goes to stocks. $9 goes to property. $9 goes to property. $9 goes to other things. $3 goes to cash.

When you get to $50k for each category (except cash) you'll be dangerous. Then you can start actually consider making a living off day trading alone.

I say property because capitalists make money two ways. One is to exploit labor, the other is to exploit property (rent-seeking behavior). They become landlords or lenders of some sort. They start businesses and steal surplus value from others. That's how you become wealthy. Obviously you're against that idea because you realize what it actually means. But that doesn't mean you can't buy things at a low price and sell them at a higher price. Doesn't have to be a necessity like housing or cars.

Other things can be stuff like precious metals, bonds, retirement savings accounts, etc.

There are tools you can use to increase your purchasing power, but they come at a price. If you have good credit, you can borrow money for investments. I would never borrow money for stonks because that's insane. But you can borrow money for property or starting a business or 501c non-profit. You can use debt as a way to build wealth. This is what all the cool capitalists have been doing for the past 40 years.

At that point it's all about managing cashflows as part of risk. You don't what to over-leverage yourself into a crushing debt.

If you don't have good credit, build it. Get a shitty credit card from anyone who will give it. Put a tiny amount of debt on there, pay it off at the end of the month. Keep doing that for a year. Then get a better credit card. Do the same thing. Keep it going until you have good cards with large amounts of credit on them. It takes years to do this from nothing.

If you have freshly bad credit, you have to wait like 7 years for it to go away (thanks Obama).

The next big step is then legal tax avoidance. But that's a whole nother long post.