Basic Strategies For First Time Investors

By Piper Marchon

The way you buy stocks has changed a lot in the last 10 years. It used to be that you had to find and contact a broker, probably go into their office in your city, open an account, and then arrange to have funds transferred. Every time you wanted to buy or sell a stock, you had to pick up the phone and tell you broker what you wanted to have done. Actually meeting up with someone and having to call them to make trades might have been a bit intimidating for a beginner.

Todays investor never has to have any contact with a real person if they dont want to. The computer and Internet has allowed the stock market game to change drastically and people can do everything themselves by just pushing a few buttons. Some may argue that buying and selling stock has become too easy because it allows people to have a gambling mentality. Day trading was an offshoot of this as people learned how to buy and sell back stocks within minutes, something they would have never done in years past with the old system.

Where can a novice investor go to learn how to buy stocks and how the market works? There are many books in the library that will explain all the terms and principles and you can also do a lot of research online. Watching investment television programs would probably not be a great idea because all those "gurus" seem to want to do is give you their stock picks that are dubious at best.

Once you learn a little, it might be a good time to just jump in and buy a stock. You have to get started somewhere and the stock market is no different than anything else you want to learn. On the job learning would apply to the stock market as well as anything else in life.

However, now is probably a tough time psychologically to start buying stocks beginners because the market has had such a bad run. When the market was going up every day, buying a stock for the first time was easy because you expected it to go up more. Any beginner had the feeling that whatever they bought would be a winner. Right now though, the atmosphere and feeling is probably just the opposite of that. Although it is good to buy stocks when they are low, it is hard to buy something that you know might not be worth as much tomorrow as it is today. Stocks have been so relentless in going down over the last year that a beginner might want to get in but be very scared. - 23226

About the Author:

Would you like to learn about buying stocks for dummies? If so, please visit my website Stock Market For Beginners.