Hi there,
Nice to see you have taken your time and are getting comfortable with the idea of investing. It is all about risk management and you need to understand your risk tolerance before you start investing. I understand the markets are vey choppy right now, especially in light of all this WSB stuff. It makes for a very difficult investing environment. Should you wait? My opinion (which is backed up by years and years of research) is that the best time to be invested in the markets is - now. There is no perfect time to enter the markets and as the saying goes Time In the market is better than time out of the market. I would just take my time and average into the positions, not jump in all at once.
If you are looking for stocks with lower volatility, then I'd recommend looking for stocks with a Beta around 1. A Beta around one means that the stock moves inline with the broader market. A Beta above 1, say 1.25 means it is more volatile than the market (25% more). Conversely, a Beta below one means it is less volatile than the market. We are limited in the number of data points we can fit on our screeners, but we do include them in our reports. Furthermore, Beta is available on sites like Yahoo Finance.
My suggestion would be to find stocks you might be interested in, then individually look up their beta to see how it compares. A good place to start is our foundational stock list - we consider these excellent bedrock stocks.
Mat