Why not simply keep doing what you are doing and buy dividend stocks with your savings? There is no rule that you have to start your own business to become a business owner...
Yeah, that's in the mix - it just feels like a mental leap, as for years my only savings have been in retirement funds, where I've focused on mutual funds. Plus I have a bit of a problem with the market just because it seems like however deep you get into the abyss of researching stocks, behaviors, fundamentals, etc - there will always be the finance firms who will have access to better information.
On top of that, the media is full of inaccurate stats of how good an investment the stock market is, long-term. They'll say things like 8% net (after inflation is accounted for). I did my own study(1) and over my investing lifetime it's been around 3.5 - 4%. That makes a huge difference in all the sample spreadsheets out there - for someone who maxes out on the Roth since age 18, that's basically the difference between being able to retire at 62 with $2 million, and having to continue working at age 62 with savings of $500k. I guess it seems like there's more control in investing it in my own business.
(1) - Looked at dates/amounts of my entire retirement contribution history, pretended I bought S&P-500 index fund each of those dates, backtested using Yahoo's "Adjusted Close", ran an APY/XIRR calculation, subtracted avg yearly inflation over same rough time period.
The 8% real return is the arithmetic average over the last 80+ years. It's somewhat useful for predicting the expected return over a one-year period. However, what you need for retirement planning and what the IRR formula gives you is the geometric average, which takes into account compounding. The historical real return was only about 6% measured as a geometric average, and there are some reasons to think that it will be lower in the future.
When you say better information, what do you mean? The actual basic fundamentals of each company are publicly available and required to be accurate. There's a lot in the interpretation, but at least on that front your actual information is on a reasonably level playing field.
I agree that getting into technical / behavior based trading is a much bigger hurdle due to all the specialized data and algorithms that go into it.
A lot of the really attractive dividend stocks have become substantially less attractive over the last 6 months due to the market rally. There were quite a few stocks giving 5-6% with good prospects of increasing in value as well 6 months ago, but I can't say the same now.
