You don't have to be a stock market expert to know that the investment industry has seen better days. For the past few years, the world has seen the health and vitality of the credit, housing and banking industries plummet, mostly through the less than ethical actions of greedy stock brokers and banks that played careless games with other people's money. Now that the money loss has slowed, people are starting to pick up the pieces, and looking for ways to rebuild what they've lost. Of course, investing is one of the simplest ways to make your money work harder, but many people are still wondering whether the stock market today is safe.

One of the most common mistakes that new investors make in the stock market today is that they get overly excited about a so-called hot stock pick, and decide to throw all their money at it without thoroughly researching the history of the organization, or taking the time to analyze the past performance of the stock through technical analysis. If they did, they would probably see that there are massive fluctuations in the value of these stocks, making them hard to analyze and representing a large amount of volatility in the market.

If you're interested in getting back into the stock market today, but want to make sure that you do so cautiously and prudently, the best thing that you can do is to develop a firm understanding of technical analysis and chart patterns. Through this method, you'll be able to track and evaluate a stock's performance over long periods of time, and make more educated predictions about whether or not it is likely to grow in the future. Although it's not a guaranteed method, this is one of the best ways that you can avoid buying a stock too late, or selling it too early.

It's very important for people to realize that the stock market today isn't toxic, it's just recovering. One of the best ways to make sure that the market remains stable is for motivated investors to get back out there and look for solid long term investments that are going to perform well for their portfolios. If you're still worried about the level of risk that you might be entering into, there are stock market safety indexes that you can monitor to find out if the market is undervalued or overvalued at any point in time.