Of course! An open mind is one of the best assets when it comes to Cryptocurrencies and there's a great number of very helpful people and resources around here.  Bitcoin grows every day through shared knowledge!

As to one of your other questions about exchanges, I would direct you to https://btct.co/faq one particular example of a Virtual Currency Stock Exchange.  Here you can put some of your BTC holdings and buy shares of stocks/bonds/funds that are typically BTC-based.  There are other sites that do similar, but it's very cool.