I'd want to do something low risk. Like under $1K but would that be too low to be worth it?
I really should point out that me sitting in India might have completely different outcomes from the same advice I might give you because tax structures, inflation, interest rates, companies, politics and loads of macro economic factors will be different.
However low risk options range from bonds which are essentially zero risk but only give enough returns to just about match inflation and there's no chance of you losing money.
Next tier of risk is equities which give a lot better returns when you take the entire market average but it's a lot more volatile and many days will be red days but over a long time period it will easily beat all other types of investing in terms of sheer returns that's why you just need to sit on it for many years for it to really show it's power. Now since the whole market has lots of individual stocks that gain a lot you would be tempted to invest directly in those but it's nearly impossible to pick consistent winners otherwise everyone will be able to print money. Investing in broad markets will let you offset the losses and let the winners carry you up.
Important to note that stock returns go up along with inflation so that's the biggest upside to them.
Last one is commodities like gold, silver, copper, oil etc. I'll just focus on gold as it's the most important one. People buy gold as a way to offset risk in stocks as the broad market has a negative correlation with gold prices so when one moves up the other down and this makes people diversify using a split of broad market funds and some percentage of gold so you can sleep easy even if the whole market is down.
Gold prices move up during wars, periods of instability or crisis. Stocks move up during periods of high inflation, low interest rates, stability and low taxes. Bonds don't give a f about anything.
With a 1000 I would first look at historical data. If you invested in different periods what would it be now? investing in 2022 would have made that 1k into 1.5k by investing in the S&P 500, (a lot more if you went tech heavy because the growth was very top heavy driven by AI).
2.7k if put in gold because of Russia-ukraine and way more reasons which all lead back to trump (this is very unusual returns for gold it's usually a lot lower than stocks).
So what do you predict about the future and invest based on that. I'm heavy on gold because we got 3 more years of trump.
