I am 25 years old and spent the last 5 years saving money and essentially sitting on it as it accrued .1% interest in my savings account. I transferred $38k into my brokerage account about three weeks ago and have gained almost $1k since then. It sounds good, but almost all of my gains are mostly attributed to my holdings in FSLR and SPWR, which are two of the largest holdings I have in my portfolio. I spent a week reading over the solar energy market and made the best educated guess I could and miraculously succeeded. This was without analyzing numbers and mostly just reading countless of articles on different solar panel manufacturers.

I don't think this is a viable way to invest my money at all and I want to become better at this. I spend almost all of my free time on the weekdays reading online and looking at stocks but I just can't make sense of all the different data entries on FINVIZ. What came easy for me to understand in solar energy, is much more difficult in areas like biotech, REI, and oil & gas, which are areas that i'd like to put money into. I am mostly interested in medium-long investments and I have no interest in day trading because I simply don't have the time while at work to do that sort of thing. How do you find companies to look into? When you find a company, what do you look for specifically?

Looking at oil & gas companies, for example: I figure that right now would be a good time to invest, as many of these companies are getting hit pretty hard from the drop in global oil pricing. Why do analysts downgrade RDS-A (Shell) when it is falling in value? I realize it is not at it's lowest in the past 52 weeks, but, surely, Shell isn't going anywhere and will climb back after oil recovers. I've read that companies are assuring investors that they can weather this storm from their reserve funds, but, in reality, those funds are almost entirely made up of their credit lines. These funds are, supposedly, getting downgraded if the pricing of oil remains constant this year, which will hurt companies like Shell even more. This sort of information is what I gleamed from articles I've read, but I have no way of knowing if the person writing the article is full of shit or not. I look at the analysts positions on stocks and try to find a correlation for why they take these positions, but come up empty-handed sometimes.