Bored with index funds? Here are tips for buying individual stocks.

You heard from a friend who bought some stock in Nvidia or Amazon or Apple when it was cheap, and now those shares are worth five or six figures. Those are inspiring stories. But how much can you safely invest in individual stocks? Financial planners advise armchair investors and retirement savers that the smartest move is usually to buy shares of index funds, the kind that track the performance of broad stock indexes or the entire market. Single stocks tend to be much more volatile. But millions of inv ...