Disclaimer: all investing and speculation carries risk, don't risk money you can't afford to lose.
Recommended Reading
The Magic of Believing by Claude M. Bristol
more coming soon
Of course, other people’s money is the first financial alchemy. If your business needs $1 million to start but is valued at $4 million post-launch, you’ve created $3 million in financial value. (depending on if you need partners to get it launched, even $1 million in financial alchemy is better than zero.)
Same goes for real estate, if you get 100% financing (could be representing the property as a realtor to get 6% commission towards the down payment, acting as a wholesaler and getting 5-20% of a bargain property for assigning the contract, using equity from other properties for down payment, finding assumable mortgages or finding actual no money down loans.) If you have loans, make sure you can afford the payments if tenants don't pay or it takes time to find them; make sure the typical rent is more than your mortgage enough to justify owning the property.
If you either have a generous 401k or form a company that you decide gives you a generous 401k matching program, you can give yourself $69k into a 401k if you have a salary of $184k (more if over 50 and earning another 30k or so.) For 401k, I suggest either Nasdaq 100, sp500 or a combination of both. You may be able to do some sort of back door, but I know employer matches can only go to 401k and not to Roth 401k.
Roth IRA is also great, currently $7k annually can be contributed; it’s amazing what this can grow to. You don’t want to take risks, as sp500 has low risks and can grow a ton over time. You can buy sp500 and write covered calls against it for income when retired. You need to know how to minimize risk when doing that, but it’s a good income strategy.
1% per day compounded equals 37x initial investment in a year, only 12x initial investment if you compound only on weekdays (about 250 days a year.) In 2 years, you'd turn $10k into nearly a million dollars after taxes ($6.3 million if compounded every day for 2 years after taxes.)
$1 a day from 18-65 at 10% is $313k, starting with barely anything; yet it's more than many people have at retirement.
$5 a day for a mere 4 years (18-22) turns into $500k by age 65 at 10% interest, that's another example of what I call financial alchemy; a tiny amount while you're young means a lot later on.
If you put away the full $7000 a year from 18-22 and get 10% from 18-65, that's nearly $2 million.
Not only do long term gains lead to financial alchemy (small amounts at reasonable returns over enough time), but so can short term gains with leverage. If you bought a stock at $10 and sold it at $20, you doubled your money; but if you saw a stock reach $100 for the first time and used day trading leverage to buy 4x your capital and it rose 25% in a day then you doubled your money as well. Same goes for if you can find a stock that rises 3-6% in a day, do that a few times with 4x leverage and you can double your investment. Of course, leverage means added risk and you should be an expert by the time you use margin or options; but it shows you the possibility. This is why I think people should have 1 class of investment in Roth IRA, another in 401k and if skilled enough to effectively speculate long term then do that in your non-retirement account and you may be rich long before reaching retirement age. It only takes two "ten baggers" (stocks that rise 900% to be worth 10x the original investment) to turn $10k into $1 million. With a Roth IRA you can make tax free income in retirement (such as by writing covered calls on sp500) so it's important to get enough in there, since you can't add more than allowed if you lose money you should be careful; sp500 or Nasdaq100 are the best choices for Roth IRA. With 401k's matching is the most important part, but a low fee index fund is good; the downside is that your company decides what investments you get to make. If you don't have time to study, just put it all in the sp500 and if you're ever down, just keep dollar cost averaging until you're up (even if you retire a few years later.)
Stock options are very risky, but there's a few ways they can be used to take advantage of their potency with less risk. The reason I put this in 'financial alchemy' rather than investing is that speculation and options are not investing; the difference is that investing you buy for today's value (ie it pays a dividend with a history of growth) rather than attempting to predict future price changes. This difference took me 15 years to really think deeply on, between 2014 and 2016; this and the mentality for effective saving were 2 major life lessons (though the later is harder to put into writing.) If retired, some people with a lifetime of savings in their Roth IRA sell covered calls on SP500 index funds, you can do this with daily options (make sure that stock is liquid for options and has daily options; never risk what you can't afford to lose) and make extra cash on a daily basis as needed; especially after 10:30 EST on days they're unlikely to hit. If you buy options, only buy calls during bull markets with stocks that are over $200 and rising from a well formed base on high volume; look for deep in the money options with enough time on them. Sometimes a $500 stock will have options $50-90 in the money that don't have a time premium with 1-4 weeks on them, that's a lot of leverage for little or no time cost, just make sure it's on the correct side of the market and make sure you can afford to take the risk. Personally, in theory; I like put options when the market looks poised to crash (as things fall faster than they rise most of the time.) If you're going to take the risks of options, learn everything you can about them and learn to manage risk. If you buy a $500 stock and it rises $50 you make 10%, if it falls $50 you lose 10%; if you buy a $50 deep in the money call for $50-55 and it falls $20 before you give up you lose at least 40%. If you write covered calls against your SP500 for 1% of the value for 1 days risk, if it rises above the strike price and your contract gets called in you may wind up having to buy those shares back at a higher price; but if you have a general idea of how to do that and keep an eye on things you should be able to avoid those and keep cash in reserves for when it goes against you and that can be profitable.
Day trading is different than swing trading, on the plus side if you have over $25k in an account you can get 4x margin on some stocks for intraday trades (the list is never published and changes from day to day, if it won't allow the full 4x margin; then it tells you when it rejects the trade) on the downside; so much of the trading gains occur between trading days that you can miss some big action. The premise to modern day trading is stocks with the most interest on a given day should be able to avoid some of the market manipulation from bots/algorithm/high speed trading, if you can make 0.25% that's a 1% movement with margin and unlike options it's the whole thing rather than 85-95% of it. For a $100 stock, that's a movement of 25 cents; $1 on a $400 stock; for stocks of this size that's not a lot of movement. The general concensus among modern day traders is to seek intraday formations where you'd sell off at a stop loss at a point no more than half as far below as the chart shows the stock can go above your price. If you buy a stock at $100 and it looks like it can go to $100.25 then you'd have to cut your losses at $99.87 or $99.88. If you can identify these chart positions, then it becomes a matter of frequency. When I day traded, I usually was right 4/5 times but never got this system to work and using methods contrary to this had horrifying losses. I had better success with swing trades and long term investing, if you don't have success with any of these; then just put it in the SP500 and don't worry about day to day fluctuations. If you can master this system and get it down to being right 4/5 of the time, you should make 3.54% per 5 trades compounded (there's that extra 0.04% in just a week of compounding.) If you can achieve success in selective day trading, it's amazing what can be achieved in 1 day with a movement of a few percent. A gain of 3.7% doesn't sound like much, but with 4x leverage that's 14.8%; you'd double your money in 5 stocks like that in a row or 5 weeks of skilled day trading where nothing went wrong. However, I don't advocate day tradng because it's very challenging to make it successful due to all the computers taking all the small gains out of the market; they've also made swing trading more challenging.