Your first stock: Make it stock in an exchange-traded fund

— -- A: When shopping for a first bicycle, you might look for fat tires, a low center of gravity and training wheels. Similarly, a long surfboard with more buoyancy might make for an excellent first board.

But a first stock? That's a little trickier because it depends mainly on you. Are you 80 years old, retired, on a fixed income and extremely risk intolerant? If that's the case, you might think about an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that owns Treasuries or other safe bonds. But if you're a 20-year-old attorney, making tons of money, getting job offers for even better jobs daily, you can afford to be more daring with your money and might consider a risky stock with more upside.

Also, what's your goal for your first stock? Do you want to buy something you can hold for a long time and watch it grow? Or, are you hoping to learn how to be a day trader and dart in and out of stocks hoping to make fast money?

Not knowing your stage in life, appetite for risk and objective for owning stocks, I'm not sure how to answer your question precisely. But what I can do is put the stock through the four steps we use to evaluate stocks so you can see if it fits what you're looking for.

As you probably already know, Medtronic is a leading maker of medical devices. That broad theme is interesting because it plays into the aging population. Also, health care can often be defensive during bad times because people don't forego critical medical treatment even if the economy is weak.

But, let's give this stock the complete workup:

Step 1: Risk vs. reward. When you take a risk on a stock, you want to make sure you're properly rewarded. Downloading Medtronic's trading history back to 1980, we see the company generated an average annual compound rate of return of 18.4%, including the current dividend yield of 1.4%. That is a healthy return if you consider the S&P 500 has posted a roughly 12.1% annualized return over the same time period, says IFA.com.