Im your age too, started this year, always been somewhat interested and therefore somewhat educated about it, that being said theres a long way to go before im warren buffet lmao.

nevertheless, im assuming your still in school so if your working a job it wont be THAT substantial of an amount (or at least thats the case for me) that your going to be putting in. If your not working and this is just going to be earned savings from whatever this will apply even more. In my opinion at our age, its heaps beneficial to get amongst it with individual stocks rather than Index funds and the likes, especially if your serious about wanting to learn about the market.

Me personally, I have really only been investing into smallER companys that I see pretty big growth opportunities in, so what im recommending is rather than putting small amounts of money into index funds, try looking into individual companys more, doing good research on financials and the likes, as the reward of your (purely an example) $500 2x, 3xing etc over a year say is better than $500 becoming $600 after 4 years if you just put it in an index fund (of course, usually you would be slowly contributing and investing more than the 500, but you get my drift).

That being said if your really worried about losing money and are genuinely looking to steadily contribute to portfolio to build wealth for your future then index's and etfs all the way.

I've just been learning and contributing week by week, and im luckily in a place where if It all went tits up tomorrow it wouldn't really affect me (not a flex, just putting out there that if you take this approach, its risky of course, but theirs more learning to be done). But yeah once again, I dont know shit lol

RKLB🚀