My brother in law flips houses. Or, right now, he invests a bunch of money to fix them up and then there they sit. I've known several people who've had bad luck with that. It sounds good in theory. Seems you really have to buy the fixer-uppers in areas where theyr'e going to move again fast. And that's just not an easy thing to do.

The stock market seems easy, but if you're doing it right, you're studying those businesses, reading the prospectuses (prospecti?), reading stockholder reports, attending meetings, and watching the market steadily so you can buy when prices are down and sell others at the right time. You also have to spread your investments around so they're not all in one area. That way when one sinks, another might be surging and you haven't sunk all your cash in one sector. Succeeding at stock trading takes a lot more work that you'd think. You have to go into it knowing you are going to lose money as well as make it.