What to do with the money in US?

A typical choice is either mortgage or retirement fund. Or anything in stock market really. I would like to assess real estate at some point, but currently I don't have enough money to think about it. The low-cost real estate options like REITs don't seem to be very interesting. There's an ongoing REIT in California right now called RichUncles, that seem to be doing some pyramid scheme instead. Its executives spend disproportional amount of money on publicity and high dividends, which makes one suspect they are using their shareholders money for that. Of course, we will only know at their liquidation event that will happen in a few years. They will either be able to pay everybody back, or not. No way to predict. They do publish some sort of financial reports and list of buildings that they buy, but there are not so many figures in those reports, and no plots whatsoever.

Which brings us back to the stock market. Stock market is huge! There are about 7000 instruments on Quantopian.com with  minute data available to analyze: companies, including recent IPOs, and ETFs - a placeholder companies which track some of the government bonds and commodities. What do all of these words mean?
IPO - a moment when company's stock becomes available on the market, as well as the company that recently has done that.
ETF - as explained above.
government bonds - have something to do with the bank interest rates and government borrowing money from citizens.
Commodities - stuff like oil price and gold.

Here's the comparison of all of that stuff over the past year (TLT is bonds, UUP is dollar futures(?), DBC is commodities, S&P 500 is "the market") :

We see that all of them went down, but in somewhat different fashion. Now what investors tend to say is that when the market is low, we need to buy in and hope for it to go up. There are also more advanced talks about rebalancing: one holds a combination of stocks and bonds, and as the stocks go down, buys more stocks and sells more bonds. There are no instructions as to when exactly should one do that. Doing that now sounds like a good idea: bonds are on the uptrend, and the stocks are really cheap. But then, one may argue that waiting for another day, month, year will give one an even better deal as today's trend continues. Nobody really knows when is it gonna revert.

Another direction of work is to try to "outperform the indices". If one carefully picks companies, avoiding the ones with dumb people in the leadership, and the ones with too smart leaders who drain money from stockholders. Avoiding also those that are overpriced, just because every single trader on a stock market wants to buy a bit of Netflix, Google, etc. And avoiding those that have ok leadership, but just not very profitable market (e.g. one-trick companies who only produce one product). After all this avoidance, there's really not much left. Not clear if this is a good strategy as the ability of non-business people to assess financial reports and leadership decisions (as well as the sentiment of institutional investors) is obviously limited. 

Now, in the internet at the end of any such article there's a solution proposed, and a link redirecting the reader to put their money in. I don't have such link at the moment, but I promise that as soon as I set it up I'll share it here. (I hope you see the irony in this paragraph)