Where to invest $ 1000 in a mutual fund or a stock?

Buy gold bullion http://www.apmex.com/, buy a couple of grams and buy some silver bullion as well. Inflation is 3.1636% now and rising, the dollar is or will be useless soon.  

You could go to Vanguard.com and open a Roth IRA, invest $ 1000 in VFIFX (Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Fund).  

The worst thing you could do is put your money in a worthless CD (certificate of deposit) or Savings Account and earn less than the inflation rate, but it takes a couple of months of money in emergency savings, but these days people are losing their jobs and have a lot of bad debt, prices of commodities are rising and disasters are happening.

I've lost and made money investing in individual stocks, but they have not lost money, but money did Vanguard.com, which says that index funds are a better investment than individual stocks because of diversification in a stock if it goes wrong I did not realize that, but if a population is large, then my index fund that goes up in price.

Do your research, take your time and not lose money but make money when investing. I think a depression is around the corner, due to high inflation and a dollar worthless which means that no organ of the purchase of goods and services, not economic growth.