There is a running joke amongst academic economists that many people will ask them what stocks they should buy, despite the fact that their research has absolutely nothing to do with finance whatsoever. Since my work focuses on asset pricing in part, I do not have this excuse. A typical, albeit not very exciting, answer to this question is "buy a broad-based index fund and don't try and pick individual stocks". The reasoning behind this is that a wealth of research finds that it is essentially a fool's errand to try and systematically identify which assets will do well and won't unless you have some kind of relevant information available to you which other investors do not have access to. All other readily available information should already be 'priced in', and so it is not possible to gain any kind of edge and beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis by using it, and consequently you should just try to diversify as much as possible while minimising your fees. This is the strong form of the highly influential efficient markets hypothesis, developed by Nobel prize winner Gene Fama, and the subject of the well-known book 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street' by Burton Malkiel. Whether or not the efficient markets hypothesis holds, in reality, is debatable, and long-debated it has been, but I think it is definitely a good approximation to reality, although probably not in its strongest form. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of Sharpe, Markowitz and Miller is a closely related idea and essentially states that the average return an asset earns should only depend on how correlated it is with the aggregate market return. Assets which covary strongly with the market portfolio (high beta assets) are risky and so earn higher returns via a risk premium, while assets that move in the other direction to the market (negative beta assets) provide hedging benefits, and so earn lower expected returns. The expected return on asset j should be given by: