At Ask Me Help Desk you can ask questions in any topic and have them
answered for free by our experts. To ask questions or participate in
answering them you must register for a free account. By registering you
will be able to:
Get free answers from experts in any of our 300+
topics.
i would like to invest just a little bit of money in the stock market. not much at all. i know next to nothing about it. any suggestions how to get started? books, hands on?
I think it would depend on your purpose in doing the investing. As for hands on, well, sometimes you just have to do it to learn. But rather than risk real money, you can always pretend invest. Or you can use real money if you can risk losing it all and don't care.
However, if you're seriously wanting to invest for the sake of investing, my personal opinion would be to go for mutual funds. You still have to pick the type of fund you want based on your purposes, but then the fund managers do the actual investing in the stocks (and/or bonds). They do all the work of deciding what to invest in, based on the purpose of that fund. Takes a lot of the work from you and they're professionals. And you still have the choice of whether it's stocks you really want, or even just a money market fund. And you can put this inside an IRA for the tax advantage.
An easy thing to do, if you want easy and just want one fund, is an S&P 500 Index fund. They're a dime a dozen (so to speak) and you can easily find one with no transaction or management fees.
You can take a class at a local college if they happen to have such a thing. (Or one of those adult night courses at the local high school or whatever.)
If you want to read up on them, I'm in the middle of reading Mutual Funds for Dummies. So far haven't learned much I don't already know, but I like Dummies books. :-) And I think it's a pretty good basic, easy-to-read book. It talks a bit about other stuff besides mutual funds (like whether you should even be investing to begin with), looking at risk, looking at time horizons, and therefore knowing what type of fund you might want, who some of the better companies are, etc. I'm not too far into it, but so far I like it.
The only other stuff I've read is Peter Lynch. Even though his Learn to Earn is supposed to be more of a beginning book, he might be a bit beyond a beginner. But you can try that one.
There's tons of stuff to be found on the web, but investing can be very opinionated. You could get a myriad of opinions here too. I personally think the mutual fund dummies book is a nice starting point.
I just think if you don't have a lot of money and can only really invest one place, an index fund is the easy way to go. That creates some diversification without you having to have enough money to invest in 20 different companies, not to mention the time to research them all.
Speaking of investing being opinionate, this is of course all just my opinion.
The Wall Street Journal has a lot of good information for investing in stocks and bonds. Now is a good time for beginners to invest in blue chip stocks because prices are so low. Some good websites that I use often are stockchase.com and stockhouse.ca
Warren Buffet and Derek Foster have very good advice on investing in stocks, so look up some of their books too.
You would be better off with a mutual fund. Mutual funds have stated objectives (i.e. short term growth, long term growth, income, etc.). You can see their track records and see the type of stocks they invest in.
Trying to invest in individual stocks, means you need to pay very close attention to the performance.
ive just invested in an IRA at work? are they the same as mutual funds?
No. Are you sure that isn't a 401K? Well, whatever... it's a retirement account.
Things like IRA's and 401K's aren't any one specific investment. It's like having a brokerage account, and then within that account, you decide what to invest in, which could be stocks, mutual funds, CD's, whatever. Except this account is for tax purposes, and with 401K's the employer may be contributing to it also. I've never had a 401K specifically so don't know much about them. When an employer does it, you may have little if any choice about it. I do have a small pension, which is deducted from my check and matched, and I have no choice about being in it, nor do I have a choice about what they do with it.
But I also have two IRA's, at two different places. Within the IRAs I can invest in anything I want. I prefer this over having one at, say, a bank, where you may have no choice over the investments, or it's limited. I'm not totally open with mine, but I can pretty much do what I want - watching out for certain fees that may apply in certain situations. My stuff is all in mutual funds, of my choosing. But I could put it in individual stocks or CD's, or even leave it in the extremely low-interest sweep account, which is like a "holding area" for any money not invested at the time.
A book on this stuff would explain all this in detail. Or well, if it's any good it will.
You might start by watching Mad Money and Fast Money on CNBC in the early evening. Then you can get on yahoofinance.com and get stock quotes by typing in the symbol, or if you don't know the symbol type in part of the name and it will bring up different options that you can left click your mouse and learn their information. You particularly want to go to Key Statistics to view the fundamentals of a stock. Whatever you do, don't use advice you see on television or sent in emails. If these people were that good, they wouldn't need to be on television or offering newsletters. They could implement their systems and become multimillionaires.
Linear Mode
