Dear peter,

The highest return on your investments, unfortunately, also are the highest risk. Risk is associated with return on investment. The higher the risk, the more your potential return. Bonds and Savings accounts represent the safest investments, and they also represent the lowest returns.

Your ability to invest is directly related to your aversion to risk. For this reason, you should seek out a professional investment counselor who works for an investment house or brokerage, so that he or she can help you to determine your risk aversion. (low risk, medium risk, high risk). Person's who are low risk averse and invest in high risk securities, stocks, etc, always end up withdrawing from the market too soon to make the investment payoff. So, the suffer a loss or only achieve small gains. You absolutely need to match your aversion to risk to your investment strategy.

The highest returns come from commodities an real estate.

The worldwide stock markets have been shown to work inverses to stocks. When the stock market is bullish, the commodities tend to be bearish, and vise versa. Right now the stock market is entering a period of a decline, and the commodities are entering a period of rise.

So for the most return and also the most risk, you would invest in commodities an stocks. To give yourself a margin of protection, you can invest in mutual funds that invest in commodities (called index funds....rogers commodities index for one), or in mutual funds that invest in high risk (low cap and high cap) stocks.

WARNING: DO NOT, ABSOLUTELY DO NOT, invest in anything that comes to you via the email, phone calls, door to door sales persons, or group invitations to private dinners, etc. There is a large level of boiler room an scam artists out there so diverse and numerous, that authorities cannot keep up with them.