Man, this post reminds me of my husband's dinner conversation some days where I nod at appropriate places and silently brain freeze.

Some further things for you to consider - companies have a PE, which is a price vs earnings ratio (the stock market has this also). A high PE means that the company's stock is doing better than it's earnings might suggest, which can be bad or indicative of the market having a positive attitude about the company's future. And of course the inverse is true. Traditionally, there's a certain range of PE's that are normal and any outside those bounds are probably more dangerous (don't ask me what the norm is though - although I do know that the DOW had a pretty high PE overall before Nov and a lot of people were predicting a self-correction to get it back to the norm levels - and now the question will it stop in the middle of teh range or drop to the low end).

Also, if you're looking for dividends and a relatively safe investment strategy, traditionally municipal bonds are the way to go. They are safe unless whole towns/counties start filing bankruptcy and they tend to pay a pretty nice percentage dividend. That said, they are getting killed right now because people are losing money everywhere and just withdrawing their money from everything they can. This could indicate a buying opportunity - but it's not clear how far they will fall if the economy continues to crater.

Stock options are risky. Often they are included as part of a package deal if you're investing quite a bit of money in a company starting up (or getting bought out) or as part of employee benefit deals. Rarely does someone just buy options on their own I think (could be wrong, but it's pretty risky). So usually you have x amount of stock and an option to buy Y amount more of the stock for a certain price that may or may not be under the market value at some point (which is when options are valuable). So if the stock does well, then you do even better than just having regular stock because you can buy at the lower price and sell immediately (sometimes) at the higher. If the stock does poorly, well you lose whatever the original stock was and so long as there is no force buy aspect then you just ignore the options. They're the imaginary gift that comes from a deal to buy a large amount of the stock itself.

And I have to run so can offer no more very amateurish comments on something my husband knows way more about.