It’s easier to invest money than ever before. You can invest in companies around the globe with just a phone call or a few clicks of your mouse. You can put your money in a seemingly infinite number of vehicles for those same companies, such as mutual funds (which contain a selection of companies in the same stock) or index funds (which mirror the movement of entire industries’ worth of stock). You can even invest in extremely complicated derivatives, which are related to the underlying stock (or, for that matter, other security) and minimize risk for one party while increasing the potential reward for the other.