There may not be quite a sure thing, but there are definitely some long shots. It's possible estimate where in the spectrum of risk a company belongs. The point is you can control to some degree how much risk you want to take.

One of the other ways you control risk is to diversify your investment among different market sectors. You may think you know a lot about say the Technology sector but if you're putting all your eggs in that basket you can get in deep trouble. Recall the "internet bubble" of 1999-2000. Part of that is also to cap the percentage of your investments in a sector to say 20% and an individual company stock to a third or a quarter of that.

It might be too much work to manage your investments so one can always go with an ETF such as SPY which tracks the S&P 500. You would find that SPY, which is pretty much automated, would do better than 90% of "managed" mutual funds. In 2013 SPY returned over 30%. To be fair, in 2008 during the financial collapse, it lost a similar amount.

Anyway, over time, the stock market provides a better return than any other investment that's generally available.