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| Please note that I am not an expert nor I pretend to be so. I am just an engineer, so my Finance knowledge is mostly based on what I read and common sense. What I've done for myself is to create a "rule" where I don't invest in stocks of companies that are relatively new or I never heard of; I prefer very traditional markets, such as mining and manufacturing. Since I don't know too much about banking, I tend to leave bank stocks out. Same applies to commodities. One thing I could recommend is to look at the mutual funds from large banks such as UBS that have comprehensive information about the performance of the funds they offer. You could even see the composition of the stocks. If you are risk-adverse, don't go for those with very high returns as they also tend to be the ones suffering most with the crashes (talking from experience  ). The other important thing that I learned after few years is that you need to monitor the movement (performance) of your assets, but do not become obsessed with that (I remember just few years ago when I used to review the results every single day, not a good thing for my heart or my family life!). Last but perhaps not least, at the beginning I didn't invest (what in my limited universe is) big amounts of money, so I could understand better what I was doing and the mechanics of the process. I also heard that when you get closer to your age of retirement one should move from stocks to something more secure like bonds, and that is what I plan to do when the time comes, but not idea to share on that area at this point of my life.
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I am scared by stocks. My Swiss grandparents were very wealthy and the way they did it was by accumulating real estate in Vaud. Then my mother and her siblings inherited and sold all the properties in the late 50s. They all completely mismanaged the money they got out of it (stocks, failing investments, bogus financial advisors, fancy cars...). A very good lesson for me.