Since the easy money of 2009 has already been made, it will be a stock picker's market in 2010 and beyond.  The U.S. economy will only gradually recover, and we may never see the boom times of the 90's again.  One bright place to look is in oil stocks.  It will be harder and more expensive to obtain oil in the future, and even if America never increases its demand for oil, China and India will take up all the slack along with putting a bottleneck on supplies.  People in Asia are driving cars and other vehicles for the first time, and they will try their best to catch up with the rest of the world.

One place to look for growing oil companies is in North Dakota.  It is estimated that we have billions of barrels of oil there.  If you want to find out more, go to ClusterGains.com and click on the Bakken/North Dakota oil link at the bottom of the home page.  You will then be taken to another site page where you will find North Dakota oil companies that are worth buying along with links to additional oil news and statistics.

Another idea for a relatively flat market is to buy high-paying dividend stocks.  Real estate investment trusts are often good when interest rates are low.  American Capital (ticker AGNC) and Annaly Capital (NLY) both were paying double-digit dividends in 2009.  Teekay Tankers (TNK) is an oil shipping company that also usually pays dividends that are more than 10% each year.