How safe is the stock market?

[kimchi]

[ QUOTE ]
anyone have any tips on accessing risk for a particular stock, sheerly based on it's numbers?

Like if i were to look at the financial + charts in the span of 1 minute on yahoo or google finance, what would be good indicators for a noob to look at?

[/ QUOTE ]

Average True Range (ATR) is a useful measure of current volatility of a market. Plotting this as a 10 or 20-day EMA can help greatly in deciding how much of your portfilio to invest/risk in a particular market at a particular time