You're probably confusing a handful of issues - when you invest in "equities" - they're usually not associated with "interest" in the traditional sense. No one is committing to paying you "interest" when you buy even bundled shares of stock in companies.

What happens is - those stocks increase in value over time - now, they may dip. You can lose your entire investment, but ordinarily that will not happen in mid-cap and large-cap companies or even small cap companies that you invest in via a mutual fund.

Now, you can participate in "dividends" which looks a lot like interest on paper, but not all companies pay dividends and those that do don't always pay every quarter.

If you invest in bonds or bond funds, those will accrue interest - that is the main feature of those investment vehicles - a steady, although typically lower, rate of interest payments as you are literally loaning the company or municipality money in return for those interest payments. But you get no equity growth and do not participate in overall economic growth with those vehicles - typically when you're near retirement/need the income/investing in a bear market is when you choose to go heavily into bonds.

Another thing you're going to want to do if you're investing in equities (stocks) is to budget a certain amount and buy at regular intervals - what seems to have happened is that you bought a bunch of stocks/stock funds a few months ago and haven't added to it - you want to set a certain amount every pay day and contribute that. Your contributions over time are what are going to add up - the "growth" or "interest" are largely secondary concerns, particularly this early.

Hope I didn't muddy the waters too much.

This post was edited on 5/16/18 at 10:15 am