Investing online carries with not only the possibility of yielding profit as well as losing your shirt. When you start getting serious about investing, there are some things you need to consider.

Always do your homework. It helps knowing which HYIP’s are good, which are scams, and which are just wasting your time. That difference between them can make or break your investment portfolio. Of especial importance is the ability to determine scams from HYIP’s that are just performing badly, as there is the tendency to figure that a poorly performing HYIP will turnaround (which does happen on occasion); a scam just costs you hard-earned money. At the same time, it helps to know if a good performing HYIP is about to go south. By doing your homework, you can get a better feel for what’s going on and what’s about to happen.

Look for trends. Trends can be good and bad; noting good trends help you make money, and bad trends stop you from losing money. A good trend is pretty obvious and should be blessed, as long as it doesn’t last too long; a good trend that goes on for too long is like a stale green light, and if the HYIP keeps an upward swing for too long it generally crashes when it starts downward, mostly due to investors thinking that it is going to crash. On the other, a bad trend that suddenly reverses itself will be exaggerated by investors seeing its stock rise and thinking that it is popular.

Listen to your environment. This is two-pronged advice: Different people have different superstitions, and they use them to determine what they will do in certain situations. This is because those methods have worked before, and hopefully will work again. Or, failure wears the same clothes, and you’ve learned to avoid whatever circumstances that are generally bad for you. I know it’s weird to depend on superstition, but it does work for a lot of people.

At the same time by paying attention to what is going on, you’ll notice trends that aren’t listed on the Wall Street Journal. By noting what people are wearing, doing and eating, and noting that you are seeing less or more of something, you can better predict how a particular stock will do. Observation can be your friend.

A last bit of advice: Don’t be afraid to take risks. HYIP’s can do well, but you need to be willing to invest in them. Also, the most profitable HYIP’s are usually the riskiest. If you aren’t willing to take risks you shouldn’t be investing in the first place. This isn’t to say that you should ignore safer HYIP’s; a good portfolio should have a range of performance, and the safer stocks usually help pay the riskier.

Just remember that investing in HYIP’s can be harrowing, but that’s the nature of the beast; the more nerve-wracking the better.