LEARN TO BUY STOCKS FOR THE FIRST TIME
Everybody has to buy their first stock sometime. Whether you are helping your child learn how to buy stocks or whether you are trying to educate yourself about the stock market, you have to learn somewhere.
Picking an online stock broker to get started and choosing which one is best for you might be the hardest part. In the end, they are so similar that it probably doesn’t matter which one you choose. If the price of each trade is what is important then you should choose one of the stock sites with the cheapest trades. If you don’t care whether a trade is $9,95 or $12.95 then maybe something else is more important and you should pick based on that.
Once you sign up for an online stock account. the mechanics of the broker’s interface are all similar. Although they will look slightly different, they will all have the same boxes where you pick your stock symbol and put in how many shares you want to buy or sell. You will then have a drop down box were you will choose when you want the trade to be made and most of the time you will choose the one that says the trade will be good till the end of the day.
It is easy to learn how to make these trades and a great place to test the waters for free is Wall Street Survivor. A stock simulation game that works just like the real thing. Wall Street Survivor is a great way to guide an imaginary starting portfolio of $100,000 and find out what it feels like to be trading. You might want to test your skill at picking stocks and this is surely a more convenient way than keeping track of everything by pencil and paper. Wall Street Survivor is 100% free to sign up for and they even have real money prizes so it is a smart move to test your stock picking skills there first before you do it for real.
If you want to learn about buying stock for the first time you don’t need to do as much as you do when you are trying to figure out when to sell. Buying is easy because you just pick a time and buy. When you go to sell however, it gets more complicated as you have to deal with your own mind games.
If you have a gain and are thinking of selling, maybe you should hold on in case the stock continues to go up. If you have a loss, maybe you should not sell also in hopes your stock will go back up. There is so much second guessing and Monday night quarterbacking that goes on in a beginner’s mind that deciding when to sell a stock is quite difficult. You have to learn to ignore all your irrational thoughts and try to make a factual decision.
Beginners who know little of how to evaluate stocks and company prospects will find making that factual decision is impossible. Professional investors have trained for their job and they understand market fundamentals and a whole lot more. This does not mean their decisions are always right but it does mean that they make decisions based on what they believe to be true and factual. They also have studied and trained on how to evaluate stocks, market conditions, and industry trends.
If you want to learn how to buy stocks, you should understand that there is a lifetime of learning that can benefit you. People have spent much of their lives trying to figure out ways to know which stock picks are winners and which are losers. There are so many variables that cause a stock to go up and down that the more you understand and learn, the more you will realize that some of it is luck. No one can see the future and no one can truly know how a company is going to perform matched against its peers.
The stock market is a place that has made many people look like dummies and many other people look like geniuses. If you happen to start investing at the beginning of the Internet boom when all stocks were going up, you looked like a pro with a Midas touch. When the market is going up day after day and most stocks are rising, it is very easy to make money and think you are good.
The true professional investor is tested in a down market when every stock pick is a critical one. If you can outperform the market during the down years and minimize losses, that is what will seperate you from the novices. During an up market, most everyone will come out a winner. But in a Bear market when everything is going down, the truly skillful investors are the ones who are able to lose the least.
Learning how to buy stocks for the first time is an important step that not everyone makes. Many people shy away from the stock market because they are fearful and intimidated by it. Others just don’t have the desire to learn or care. If you are trying to learn about stocks and how to pick them, there is a lot of information available. Choosing the right sources of guidance is hard when you have no way to measure it though. You should start out buying small amounts of stock and treading the water lightly until you get a better fell of what stock market stocks and investing is all about. As you learn and move forward, you can make more confident buys and sells and hopefully you will be on your way to a profitable lifetime of investing in stock.
