There are lots of different ways to "play" the stock market, but they generally fall into two basic categories: investing and speculating. It sounds like your friends at the Ten Cat are speculators. Speculating is kind of like gambling, but most speculators claim to have a "system" that is more sophisticated than random chance. I guess some gamblers have a system too, so maybe it's not that much different. What a speculator is trying to do is buy low and sell high. He will buy a stock that he considers to be undervalued, and then sell it when he thinks it has reached a plateau and is not likely to go higher anytime soon. An investor is generally in it for the long term. He will buy stocks that he believes have long term growth potential and hang on to them until he needs the money for something else, like his retirement.
To become a successful stock trader requires an expenditure of time and effort that many of us are either unable of unwilling to put forth, so we buy mutual funds instead. A mutual fund is like a club where a bunch of people put their money together and hire somebody to manage it for them. The fund actually owns the stocks, and the members own shares of the fund itself. There are lots of different mutual funds with lots of different investment philosophies. Deciding which ones are appropriate for you can itself be a daunting task, and there are people who will do it for you for a price. There is no reason, however, that the average amateur can't read up and learn enough about it to make his own decisions. This requires time and effort too, but not nearly as much as it would take to become a successful trader of individual stocks. I'm sure you could find out anything you need to know on the internet nowadays but, when I did it, the internet was in its infancy, so I read a few books and magazine articles and talked to other people who were into it. They also gave us some classes at the paper mill before they shut down, which was nice of them.
The fund I ended up with is called an "index fund", which is about the most conservative approach you can take to investing in the stock market. What they do is buy everything, in proportion to the percentage of the total market valuation that the stocks represent. For instance, if General Motors stock represents 1% of the total value of the stock market, then they would put 1% of your money into General Motors. Okay, mine is called the "Total Market Portfolio", but you can also find funds that buy only a sector of the market, say the Standard & Poors 500, which is a list of the 500 biggest companies in the U.S. An index fund will generally not sell a stock ever, unless they need the cash to buy out a member who wants to redeem his shares in the fund. My fund tries to keep enough loose cash on hand to cover redemptions, but they had to sell some stock at least once because too many people were cashing in at the same time. I believe that was during the crash of 2000 or 2001.
In your case, it sounds like you've already got your money taken care of, but it wouldn't hurt to have somebody look over your portfolio once in a while to see if there might not be a better allocation of your resources. "Better" doesn't necessarily mean a chance to make more money, in this case, it means "more consistent with your long term goals and risk tolerance". There is always a certain amount of risk in any investment, but the degree of risk can vary widely from one plan to another. It's important that your program involves a level of risk with which you are comfortable. There are quizzes you can take that help you assess you risk tolerance. Most advisors will have at least one in their desk drawer or, again, I'm sure you could find one online.
I could tell you more, but I don't know how much you already know, or want to know. This stuff can be complicated, but I have found that, like with computer technology, it helps if you break it into chunks and only chew on the chunk that currently interests you.
Have a good one.
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