how to buy stocks online

Anyone looking into buying stocks for the first time needs a place where they can learn the ropes. A great place to get started is a fantasy stock market game. In this type of game, you will have access to a stock trading simulation that works just like you will see when you sign up for a real discount online broker.

The best stock trading game is called Wall Street Survivor and it is absolutely free to sign up and get started playing  Wall Street Survivor is meant for beginners and people who want to learn about the stock market and how to trade online.

I went ahead and signed up which takes about a minute and found out that there are a lot of exciting things going here. You have a good stock simulator game that includes both weekly and monthly contests where you can win prizes. Best of all, it is FREE!

In this game you learn how to buy and sell stock just like you will do when you graduate to the real thing and make your trades with an online broker. By playing the game you will learn how to make your trades and understand all the different options you will have when buying real stocks. There are many different kinds of trades you can make such as shorting stocks and limit trades and you can learn them all at Wall Street Survivor.

One thing that makes this the best fantasy stock market game is the amazing amount of material that is available for FREE. There are tutorials, training videos, a huge forum, and the numerous contests which you are automatically entered in just by signing up.  They also have a big research section where you can research your stock picks before you make them or just learn how to research them first. It is a real big community and getting involved is what they want you do do. Once you sign up to Wall Street Survivor you will realize what a great learning and fun site it is. 

At the beginning you will be given $100,000 in virtual cash to start making trades with. This will be the money you start your portfolio with and from there you can buy and sell stocks (with your fantasy dollars). During the day while the market is open you will be able to trade stocks just like you would for real at any real broker. After hours trading is the same and just like in real life, you can learn how to do all the different kinds of buys and sells and anything you can do at a real online broker you can learn how to do here. Here is a snapshot of my account right now:

In Wall Street Survivor you will be learning how to manage your very own stock portfolio and you will do it by making simulated trades that are executed on a real-time stock trading platform. This is a great fantasy stock market game and it’s FREE price makes it even better!

So, you are going to learn how to buy stocks but you want to know if there is a best time to buy them. You might have heard of the Santa Clause rallies in December or that the market goes down every October. Not only would you like to know if there is a best month to buy stocks but maybe there is even a best time of the day to buy stocks too?

It is true that there are different times of the year when there is typically more or less activity in the market. For instance, in July and August more families are taking vacations than at any other time of the year. That means less people are paying close attention to the stock market and making investment decisions. Trading volume typically goes down for those months as does all activity on the Internet.

There are times when stock trading volume picks up and that is right after summer and following Christmas. In each of those cases, people go back to work in force and life returns to normal which means people are thinking about their jobs and investments. They have more time to pay attention to the news, surf the web, plan their futures and make stock buying and selling decisions.

You can see from the 10 year Dow Jones chart below though, that in the last 10 years there is really no pattern you can discern for what month or season of the year is better for stocks. 2001 and 2001 look similar with the Dow going down after summer but then going up sharply at the end of the year. But that pattern doesn’t hold for the other years.

In 2003 it was straight up almost the whole year and in 2004 and 2005 it was choppy all year with slight gains being made. 2006 was another good year with one major blip in the middle of the year and then 2007 was straight up until all hell broke loose during the second half.

2008 saw the market go down and keep going down all the way to March of 2009 when things reversed and went up for the rest of the year. Finally, 2010 has been choppy all year with no clear direction being chosen.

What you should take away from this is that rather than try to pick the best season to buy stocks or the best time of day to make your stock buys, you should be concentrating on finding the best stocks to buy right now. If you make good solid stock picks and are willing to hold them as long as the fundamentals remain good, you don’t have to worry about anything else.

Stock investing is a long term endeavor where you need to show patience and consistency. You don’t want to be jumping all over the place with different strategies on when to buy, when not to buy, and other things that are pretty much equivalent to market timing. Make your stock picks based on the fundamentals and any other personal information or opinions you might have. If you do that throughout your investing career, you won’t need to bother thinking about what time of the year it is and whether you should be buying or selling based on that.