It's time for poker players to start putting their money to work.

[Scorpion Man]

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I am a junior in college, 21 in a few months, with a major in Early Childhood Education and minors in Math and Spanish. Currently I have around 5K I would like to invest. I make a nice amount of money from poker (for a college student at least) and am very interested in getting into investing. If you were me what kind of things would you be doing?
Mike

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One general thought on this topic...This may be overly obvious to people but I figure it's worth writing down.

The importance of your investment strategy is a function of the ratio of your portfolio to your earnings and your spending. (IMO, if your earnings are outsized compared to your portfolio, you are either just getting started or you are spending too much). So...when you have a small amount of money, like $5k, the main reason to start investing is to get into good habits and learn. Your odds of making enough after tax money to matter to you are very low. You also cannot buy invidivual stocks very cost effectively and have any kind of diversification at all.

If I had $5k and wanted to get exposure to the market i would split it between SPDRs (ticker SPY...its the S&P 500) and VTI (vanguard total market return) and perhaps the IWM (Russell 2000 -- a small cap index).

This is not particularly scientific, and a more sophisticated portfolio might be reweighted over time to vote on whether you think big or small caps would be outperforming....but this is not a bad way to start.

you could also use or substitute QQQQ (Nasdaq) if you want more technology weighting. I don't love the QQQQ because it is overly weighted in some megacaps - MSFT, QCOM, AAPL, GOOG are 20% of the index!

Other possibility is the EFA for broad international exposure.

This is a good place to learn what you are actually buying when you buy ETFs:

http://www.etfconnect.com/