How to make money in the stock market

I am not a stock market expert. In fact, I don't own any stocks. I had invested in mutual funds many

My stocks today

years ago, but I lost a large percentage of that money so I decided never to do that again. Now, that said, let me finish this. I just didn't want anyone arguing with me that what I'm suggesting isn't sound. This is just my theory and how I developed it.
A few months ago someone asked me if I had $10,000 to put in the stock market what I would do with it. I said I would pay off bills not invest it. She said to think about it and I did. I went to www.HowTheMarketWorks.com and invested $10,000 in virtual money. On May 14 I invested safely in Market Funds. I chose the aggressive fun and the non aggressive fun and invested in both equally. I also invested in some stock that sounded like a good idea. One was one that dealt with medical buildings and the other was a gold mining company. Both seemed like they would be growth funds because of what is going on in the economy.

Over the last 30 days

The mutual funds have steadily been loosing money since then and the two stocks I chose were not doing very well. Since this was virtual money I thought I would experiment for a while. I made some good choices, and some bad. I sold 75% of the mutual funds since I needed some money to "play" with and got rid of the gold mining stock since it was doing so bad. I found something in my mail box that said that penny stocks were the best to make fast money. It seemed like a good omen since I just happened to stumble on this piece of mail. I put $2000 in that stock, they suggested I buy at $.50 and sell at $1.50. That sounds good to me. Two days after I made that buy the stock was at $.10 and I thought it couldn't go any lower so I bought more and it is now $.04. So, I just left that stock alone since it is only worth $98 now. (I learned from that not to think God is talking to me through mail.)
I also realized I was seeing a lot of Tesla cars on the road these days and thought that was a good omen. I bought tesla stock on July one and it has increased 24% in a month.
About two weeks ago I thought about what someone had told me once. He said most people are looking for the stock at its lowest point and then buy it before it goes up. He said when a stock is going up you should buy it, thinking it will continue to go up and when a stock is going down you should sell it thinking it will continue going down. I don't know if that sounds reasonable or not, but I have been working under that concept for two weeks and have almost made up the $2000 I lost in my stupid mistake of buying penny stock. Every night I look at the most active stocks (http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/most-active.aspx) and look at which stocks have gone up the most that day. I buy it and then if it goes down 2 days in a row I sell it. This has worked over the past 2 weeks and am beginning to have confidence in it.