Buying a stock for beginners.?

Question

i know there's two things you can be, like investing and something. whats the diff b/w shares and stocks? how do you read those graphs and what do like +65454.543 or -8763.5463? im young, and i just want to know about this stuff for like when i get older. i checked out wiki but i just dont get it.

Answer 1

Shares and stocks are sort of the same thing. The stock would kind of be the company itself. Each public company has a ticker symbol. This is a 3 or 4 letter symbol that tells you what stock it is. Like, GE (general electric) is actually GE. J Crew is JCG. Shares are what you actually buy - like 100 shares of J Crew. Of 5000 shares of GE.  I'm not sure where you got the numbers from, but they could be any number of things. It could be how many shares traded that day for a certain company, it could be how much the market (or an index) was up or down that day. You should go get Investing for Dummies...one of those yellow and black books. It is way too much info to even get into here...but good for you for wanting to learn about it...!

Answer 2

Shares  are  just  the  number   that  you  own of  a  stock .

Stocks  are  "pieces"  of  a  company .

The  graphs  are  just  the  price  of  the  stock  and  it  can  be  a  1  day  or  3  month  or  year  etc .  .  .

An  excellent  place  to   learn  is  yahoo  finance ,

There  is  an  education  section  under  the  investing  tab

http://finance.yahoo.com/

It  is  all  free  and  you  can  create  hypothetical  portfolios  ( lists  of  stocks  that  you  might  have  bought  on  a  certain  day )  to  see  how  you  do .

I  recommend  following  the  most  active  link  for  a  month  to  get  an  idea  of  how  it  all  flows .   .   .

Good  Luck  !

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Answer 3

here are some steps to  prepare you.

Step 1.

First decide what kind of brokerage you want to work with. You can open a brokerage account in your bank, with a large full service brokerage or an internet brokerage. I find when I get help, most people want to sell me things that are better for them….

So I use http://www.scottrade.com because it’s cheap and easy with low frills. I like their streaming quotes and I do my own research and make my own investments. But any low cost internet brokerage service is fine.

Step 2. get a subscription to Barrons or Investors Business Daily… Do this for 6 months or a year. At first, It seems a bit mysterious, but pretty soon you start to understand the terms and things that investors are looking for and what they are afraid of.

Step 3. If you have some money to invest, put it in 3 month CD’s right now. First the market is unstable and second you have some homework in Step 3 to do before you do any investing.

Step 4. Go out to the internet and search on the following subjects. Become very familiar with the concepts.

Asset allocation

Long term investing

inflation  

Roth ira vs ira

Large med small cap

Value vs growth

Indexed mutual funds

No load mutual funds

ETF

Sector funds

Bonds CD preferred stock

dividends

International funds

Market cycles

volatility

Fundamental analysis

Technical analysis

In most cases, I think it is wise to use indexed mutual funds and ETF to build the base of your portfolio.

Step 5 go to http://clearstation.etrade.com/ and sign up for a free account. Play around there by looking at graphs and fundamentals. If you click on the graph names, you will get clear information about what the graph means and how to interpret it. I think it’s also a good idea to pretend you have $10,000 and start buying and selling on paper. Keep track of where you are each day for a month… It’s a lot easier to lose play money then real money….

WARNING: don’t rely on technical analysis alone. These graphs are good at telling you WHEN to buy and sell, but not WHAT to buy.

Don’t get involved with futures, currency, options (unless you get stock options at work), commodities, annuities or other derivative type investments at this time.

It would be wiser to build a portfolio with broad based asset allocation through diversified mutual funds and etf's (After you have spent a lot of time in step4, you will understand what this means and why it is wiser)

Good Luck