If you are new to investing, you'll find there is a lot to learn, but you will also discover that investing doesn't really have to be that complicated. These two ideas seem at odds with one another but both can be true.

Wall Street tends to make things more complicated than they need to be, but if you take a long-term view and focus on good, solid companies, you can have success -- and learn as you go. An excellent way to get started is by investing in an exchange-traded fund that tracks a broad index like the S&P 500, because that gives you access to the biggest and best companies. But if you want to dip your toe into individual stocks, here are two great ones for beginners.

Online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the fourth-largest company in the U.S. with a market cap of $1.1 trillion. Just last year, it became much more accessible to the average or new investor when it implemented a 20-for-1 stock split, which means the stock price was cut by a factor of 20 as each existing shareholder was given 20 shares for each share they held.

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Source Fool.com