If I gave you....?

...$100,000, how would you invest it to get the best return?

75% Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Investor Shares

25% Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund

for 20 years with reinvestment and biannual rebalancing will beat anything else offered...betcha a nickel.

I would buy an SRT-4 and fix it up and race it to make more money. An investment on wheels!

I'm pretty conservative. I'd put it in a money market fund at Vanguard and then dollar-cost-average it into a mix of mutual funds over the course of two years. That means investing a little over $4,000 per month over the next 24 months. This protects you from a sudden down turn in the market.

I would buy Dow component stocks, because the Dow is going to outperform almost everything else for the next 20 years at least....Why? Think about it, the Baby Boomers are all going to try to retire soon, and few of them have saved enough to live on from even the sunniest predictions from bond yields, so they will have to buy stocks. But Boomers are predominantly risk-averse (with their money, not their health! LOL!), so will only buy stocks they peceive as "safe".

So money pours in to Dow stocks, and prices continue to climb...

You might realistically expect an average annual 12-14% return from these stocks over the next 20 years...

I think...

(But I have been wrong before!)

I would invest it in the stock market in stocks that I researched and selected myself. I would trade neither long or short term... I'd keep an eye on the stock and whenever they seem like they've gone up quite a bit I'd sell out and buy something else, or wait for it to drop back down again. On average, I would sell every 1-3 months. This can easily net 10-15% per year.

Please say you're actually giving me $100,000 XD

bank CD's

I would invest it in an apartment building in an up and coming market. (Put $100K down and finance the rest) Not only would you receive monthly payouts and gains, (you can get good returns such as 30% or higher) but apartment rents are going up right now which will increase your profit. (Most markets are good for apartments right now.)

Lastly, as apartment rents go up, the value of the building goes up. So what happens is that you end up being able to sell that building in the near future, collect all of your money back, plus good profit from the increased value, PLUS you received monthly payouts all along.