Stocks? Anyone have a clue in this?

[SwiftWind]

I've been looking at perhaps trying out the stock market and maybe purchasing one share first for the hell of it and see what happens to it. How complicated is it?

Where's the best place to do it and what's involved? I also want to know how do you purchase stocks overseas? are there legal issues? Tax issues? Bah, this is why I haven't gotten into it yet. I have no idea where to start!

read some guides, but they usually only focus on one specific market. Anyone here willing to provide better info?

P.S.

Thread crappers / flamers, get lost. If you don't like what you see, then don't look at this thread.

 

[Kenazo]

There are tons of threads on this topic already.


Anyway, I use eTrade and like it. I'm in Canada though so our options are limited.

As for what stocks to pick, I usually check out the biggest losers list to see which stocks lost the most during the previous day, then check them all out to see which are actually making a profit, find out why they dropped, etc. If it looks like they should be higher, I buy. It's worked for me so far.

for tax issues, I'm not in the US, so not sure what kind of tax is on capital gains down there. Here it's the full tax rate, but on 50% of the gain.

Overseas stocks: I wouldn't bother. There's tons of stocks here in N.A., there are winners here too.

Legal issues: Unless you end up owning a controlling share, or you are in a really privelaged position at a company, or know someone that is, I wouldn't worry too much about legal issues unless you're buying shares of that company. For example, I'm an accountant and we audit a few publicly traded corps. I'm not supposed to buy shares in those corps, otherwise I'd be pulling a Stewart.

Any other questions?

 

[SwiftWind]

Ok, how do you buy it ? What's the easiest / cheapest / most hassle free way to do it? I just want to do some research and then pick one, and buy just one stock to see how I do...then maybe later on go heavy if it works out okay.

 

[Kenazo]

Originally posted by: SwiftWind
Ok, how do you buy it ? What's the easiest / cheapest / most hassle free way to do it? I just want to do some research and then pick one, and buy just one stock to see how I do...then maybe later on go heavy if it works out okay.

I'm presuming you're asking how the online brokers work.

You sign up for an account with let's say eTrade (there's a host of others as well). You'll have to do this a couple days ahead of the time you actually want to buy your stocks. You'll then have to transfer money into your account. eTrade needs a min of $1000 to open an account, some of the others are higher.

Once you're money is in there you are ready to trade. The brokers will all have some sort of a step by step process to buy a stock, it's quite easy.

Anyway, for us Canadians the fees are generally around a $25/trade minimum, I know that Americans seem to get better rates than this.

So, after you own the stocks, it's kind of like doing online banking, you can check the balance, the value of your stocks, etc.

 

[Otaking]

Easiest way is to purchase stocks from a mutual fund which are based on a cluster of stocks.

You can be risky or conservative depending on what kind of portfolio you have, e.g. S&P 500, growth funds, value funds, etc.

 

[Kenazo]

Originally posted by: Otaking
Easiest way is to purchase stocks from a mutual fund which are based on a cluster of stocks.

You can be risky or conservative depending on what kind of portfolio you have, e.g. S&P 500, growth funds, value funds, etc.

I would agree, though sometimes it's fun to actually own a particular stock, and as long as you're playing with money you can afford to lose, no harm.

 

[habib89]

if you have money just doing nothing, and you're alright with gambling, AND you have time during the day to just watch the stocks, i find it kind of fun to day trade.. that would be buying and selling, sometimes in the same day, huge volumes of stock.. say you buy 10000 shares of stockA, and it goes up $0.10, you just made yourself $1000 (-fees)... this is of course super super risky, and not something i suggest you do right now since you're new to the market.. also it may not be all that profitable in the long run.. eg: my friend bought netscape stock back in the day.. bought some.. sold.. bought again.. sold... he calculated that if he just bought, after it became aol, and went through all the splits, he would have made something on the scale of $500,000 starting with just a few thousand... lessons to be learned..

right now, what i would do is watch some stocks.. something you're familiar with, say tech stocks... look into some companies that are maybe relatively new, or you think has a very promising product..

the safe route (as mentioned earlier) would be a mutual fund.. but those are for people who actually want to save, and have some sort of financial security in the future... boooo

just remember.. buy low and sell high

 

[Juice Box]

If you get a fidelity account...its $8 a trade no matter what...but their Customer Service sucks

 

[DaveSimmons]

Advanced Search on "broker" and "invest stocks" to find old threads

www.fool.com is one good site, or at least it was a couple of years ago on my last visit

If you're doing this to invest rather than for a hobby, as always I'll suggest going to www.vanguard.com and buying their VFINX S&P 500 index based mutual fund instead.

For ready cash, www.INGDirect.com probably pays more interest than your bank.

 

[ponyo]

Since the invention of the internet, it's easy to buy and sell stocks. Tons of information, online trading, and scores of discount webbrokers. It used to be lot harder when I started with very few choices on discount brokerages.

I suggest reading and research and practice with something like Yahoo finance portfolio before risking real money. When I started I read all the Peter Lynch books. Very easy to read and entertaining. He used to run Fidelity Magellan fund back in the day.

You can buy domestic and international stocks. Domestic stocks are easier to deal with but international stocks are not that hard. Well known international stocks are usually on the NYSE and trade in form of ADRs. One of my early purchase was foreign ADR and I still have it today although it has since split into many companies. You pay foreign taxes on the dividend but it's not much different from US company dividend. That's if the company pays dividend. That said, there are plenty of good US companies so most people don't have to look to abroad.

Good luck and hope you catch multibagger. I got lucky and caught a 6x on my first stock purchase. Hooked ever since.

 

[drnickriviera]

If you just want to play around and test the water, why bother to buy 1 share? Go to finance.yahoo.com and build your portfolio. Once you've developed your system of picking stocks, then open a brokerage account. All you would do now is give the brokerage companies commission money, and most require a minimum deposit $2k-10k

 

[Kalbi]

People like you should buy SPY and keep it for 30 years and sell for $1 million.