There are many types of investing strategies. Some investors like the relative safety of exchange-traded funds, while others prefer going toward small, low-priced stocks with high growth potential. It all depends on your tolerance for risk, which can change throughout your time as an investor. Contributor Elyse Andrews has a few suggestions below to help you get the most from your investments.

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Every morning when I look through Investor’s Business Daily, something in its pages catches my eye. It’s a little box, usually in the second section, that details How to Succeed with IBD. It inspired me to write How to Succeed with Cabot.

1.) Select a system. Our newsletters run the gamut of investing systems. From growth and value to options trading to emerging markets to energy; we cover a vast section of the investment landscape. It can be daunting, especially for new investors, to determine which system best suits them, but it’s a very important task. One way to help determine this is by taking our quick quiz:Which Cabot Letter is Right for You?

Read the rest in today’s Cabot Wealth Advisory.

With the holiday season safely behind us and the New Year well underway, I’m always curious about the best-performing stocks of the past year. I want to know which stocks did the best, get a sense of why they prospered and see if there are any investing lessons that might help me bag one of the big winners in 2012.

I’m not really interested in penny stocks or very low-priced stocks–they’re just too risky–so I screened the entire market for stocks that haven’t traded anywhere near penny stock territory during the year. I also set the bar above 50,000 shares traded per day, just to get rid of the May-flies that can zip higher on any big trade.

(Just by the way, one of Cabot’s newsletters, Cabot Small-Cap Confidential, specializes in finding diamonds in the rough with no limitations on price or trading volume. Cabot Small-Cap Confidential finds those diamonds via extensive research and identifies companies with compelling technologies, drugs or products that have enormous potential long before most investors are even aware of them. It may take a while for the market to catch up with these micro-wonders, but when it does, the results can be dramatic. If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can join the strictly limited subscription list by clicking here

What I got (after eliminating a couple of pretenders whose stock splits were missed by my data service) was a list of 24 stocks that booked price appreciation of more than 100% from the close on December 31, 2010 to the close on December 30, 2011.

Read the rest in today’s issue of Cabot Wealth Advisory.

Netflix (NFLX) stock surged 11.4% last Wednesday, on big volume, as the company released some encouraging data about its customers’ embrace of video streaming, stating, “More than 20 million subscribers worldwide watched more than two billion hours of old TV shows and movies on devices with high-speed Internet connections during the final three months of last year.”

On Thursday the stock paused, but on Friday it surged again, to its highest level in a month, on even greater volume.

And that raises the question, “Is it time to get back into Netflix?”

After all, the stock is 72% off its highs of mid-2011 when it alienated customers by raising prices and then goofed (big-time) by announcing and then cancelling a plan to separate its DVD-by-mail and video streaming business. Having lost $12 billion in valuation since then, Netflix looks cheap to a lot of investors; in fact some view it as a takeover target, citing Amazon (AMZN) and Yahoo (YHOO) as potential buyers.

Read the rest in today’s Cabot Wealth Advisory

Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, can be one of the more attractive investment vehicles on the market today. Traded on the market like stocks, but with the relative safety afforded by mutual funds, investing in an ETF can be an attractive option for the conservative investor.

Before you buy an ETF, as with any investment vehicle, it pays to do your research. Should you read Cabot ETF Investing System as part of that research, you could bank gains that beat the S&P 500 by 33.86% over the three years prior to August 31, 2011.

To explain more about the Cabot ETF Investing System, I’m going to turn the floor over to contributor Elyse Andrews.

Read up on the Cabot ETF Investing System in the weekend edition of Cabot Wealth Advisory.

Happy New Year! I’ve spent the last few issues looking back at 2011, and the trends and stocks that dominated the year. Now that it’s 2012, it’s time to look ahead!

Over the last couple of weeks, submissions have been rolling in for The Dick Davis Digests’upcoming Top Picks for 2012 issues. As I’ve mentioned here before, in addition to representing the very best investing ideas of proven experts, the Top Picks can also offer an in-a-nutshell glance at what analysts are expecting in the coming year. In addition, many editors have laid out their expectations for the New Year in their own letters. Combining these sources gives us a pretty good picture of what Wall Street is expecting in 2012.

Given the lousy last year, many of the predictions hinge on resurgences, revivals and rebirths.

The first rebirth could come from the housing sector, which, as everyone knows, has been a dead horse for the last five years, since the housing market collapsed. But 2012, some experts are saying, could be the year that these stocks begin to come back to life.

Check out the rest of Chloe’s thoughts in today’s Cabot Wealth Advisory.