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The stock market is a crock. Let's be honest. For so many years now, decades even, people have been told to sock money away in stocks, buy for the long haul, it'll pay off later, and so on, only to see in the last decade two - count ‘em, two - massive bear markets during which no amount of individual research spared anybody.

I've been writing about stocks for more than 15 years. When I started, historical data showed that an ordinary person could look at basic company factors like how much it earns, its marketing plans, and how expensive its stock is, to decide if it's worth owning. That's called fundamental research, and anybody could do it.

Did it matter, though? Not really. When big factors like loose money policy from the Federal Reserve or bank shenanigans like we saw in the subprime mortgage crisis cratered the whole economy, owners of nearly every stock got slammed. The big, the small, the good, the bad - they all went down as a block. All that time people spent sifting through details was time wasted. Stock = stock = stock = good luck when factors beyond your control kill ‘em all.

That's what ticked me off a little more than a year ago when I decided that the 2010 edition of my bestselling "The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing" needed to give people some new tools to defend against the craziness. The problem with where society is heading is that there are so few ways left for regular folks to get ahead. What, overpriced homes? A dollar backed by a government drowning in debt? A block of stocks that go wherever government and banks want them to go? Nice options.

Unfortunately, the stock market remains one of the few ways for people who don't own a business to get ahead over time. The stock market is a drag, filled with a million ways to go broke, but there are some things non-professional investors can do to give themselves odds of succeeding.

The subset of options that are attractive narrows down in a hurry. Daytrading? No, almost nobody can do it and it's the most stressful activity this side of Toyota brake testing. Penny stocks? No. Buy and hope? No. Follow a locked-in growth formula that works no matter how the market's manipulated? Hmm, maybe.

That's what I'll look at with you tomorrow.

The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing Jason Kelly Investing How-To Stocks Market Finances Wall Street