is it possible to make a living by buying the right shares?

With about a million worth of investments, a pretty good living.

The idea of retirement investments is to gradually accumulate enough investments to live off of the dividends and coupons.

At 15, you are young enough f take some risks in your investments and make up any losses before you are too old to work, so say investment information sites. However, you may need to be 18 before you can do a lot of things in your own name, such as investing. You can ask an adult to sign off on investments for you or you can use the time between now and then to educate yourself about investment options.

A pretty decent starting point can be found in Yahoo finance. Another can be found at Motley Fool.

Short version - stocks are riskier but with higher potential payout. Bonds are safer with a set payback. Savings instruments (CDs through banks, savings accounts) are basically a place to park your money and get a miniscule payback. These can, however, allow you to accumulate funds to invest in other places, which have minimum investment amounts. ($300 minimum for Computersheare last time I checked)

Watch out for market crashes, such as what happened in 2008 - they can wipe you out.

research - http://www.fool.com/

http://finance.yahoo.com/ allows you to set up and track pretend portfolios to see how you do.

Bonds - https://www.treasurydirect.gov/

When you get to the point where your money works harder than you do, that's called "being able to retire."

Wanting to do that at 70 is great.

Wanting to do that at 15 is laziness.

Mahatma Gandhi said that having "wealth without work" is one of society's seven deadly sins.

not unless you have a huge investment in the first place