Corporate Bro, I have been in this stock game for a while and its good for the sake of knowledge you get about finance and stocks. It really makes your day interesting and exhilarating.

However, it also takes up a lot of your time during work hours. The market is open from 9:30 to 4 ET, and if you're buying and selling your own stocks you'll be checking them constantly. You don't want to invest small amounts like say $1000 dollars, because the brokerage charges you 5-8 dollars per trade (buy and sell), so even if you do make a gain, it will be diluted by the brokerage fees. So you'd want to make investments of about 4-5000 per stock.

However, if you buy a lot of stocks you'll be constantly checking your account to see if you went up or down. It will take a heavy toll on your work. Same thing happened to me, at one point I had 7 stocks worth 5-6 k each floating around in the market and I could not get any work done. I could only get work done after 4 when the markets had closed. When I did well I'd go out, get an excellent dinner and party and when I was down, I'd stay in my apartment all day and do nothing.

In short it is really stressful this stocks game. If you want a more stable return, you can do lending club, etf, annuities, life insurance, cd's etc. Your money will grow slowly and steadily. In stocks you can make a lot of money really fast, but you can also lose a lot of money thanks to Wall Street market manipulators and be left holding the bag of fleas.

My two cents.