Anyone on Wall Street will tell you that a major key to making money is diversifying their investments - putting money into different industries, different sized companies and different markets. By purchasing stock in all of these different types of companies, the risk of each individual stock is drowned out by the collective strength of the portfolio.

The same principle applies in fantasy baseball. Every, single player comes with some kind of inherent risk, some obviously more so than others. Age, inexperience, injuries, run support issues, lineup protection, etc., etc., are all unique risks to individual players. The goal of diversifying is to eliminate all of these individual risks, which can be done by building collective strength through complementary pieces.

A team full of high upside, low certainty young players is risky, but so is a team full of low-upside, high-certainty veterans. The trick is to seek out a happy medium of sure things, long shots, safe risks (2nd and 3rd year players ready to break out), veterans and youth. With some nice assembly, the results are almost always positive.

Get low-risk veterans in the first few rounds? Take advantage of that strength and open yourself up to the risk of a rookie or unknown commodity. Did you go with sky-high upside early? Even that out by looking for veterans in the later rounds.

As you proceed through your draft, you want to balance out your personnel while filling positions as effectively as you can. This requires an owner to not take a rigid approach to drafting, but rather take what the draft gives him. Changing preferences on the fly and adjusting to developing strengths and weaknesses are keys.

The top few picks set the tone for the whole draft and determine what positions and types of players we need to seek later. If we land infield depth and quality power hitters, then speedy, well-rounded outfielders are the priority. Conversely, if we take fliers on Grady Sizemore and Carl Crawford, power and corner infielders become more valuable.

There are thousands upon thousands of possibilities for every draft, and there are just as many ways to tweak your approach. Just remember, as important as it is to build strengths on your roster, it’s equally important to eliminate potential weaknesses. And you do so by finding the players who complement your top draft choices the best.