Although the stock market tends to go up over the long term, there are always down periods along the way, including the recent bear market that began in 2022. Luckily, brighter days should eventually be on the way. If you have $1,000 to invest before the next stock market rally, I'd use it to cover a lot of ground with S&P 500 and Russell 2000 exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Those may not be "flashy" options that rile investors up, but they're effective -- and that's what truly matters.

The S&P 500 is an index that tracks the 500 largest public U.S. companies by market cap. Because of the companies within it and the sectors they span, the S&P 500 has become the benchmark for the U.S. stock market. When people refer to the "stock market's performance" broadly, they're usually referring to the S&P 500.

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Source Fool.com