Investing In The Stock Market?

[NickyL0885]

Hey. Question. How hard is it to invest into stocks? Honestly, I cant afford to pay a broker. Ive seen commercials for all the online brokers but I dont know if they are even reliable or which one is best or affordable. Like, for instance, I want to invest into Sirius radio stock. its at 2.93 and according to Jim Cramer, it wont go anywhere until the merger and if you have it, hold on to it b/c its a nice lottery ticket. I would def invest $100 into it. Seems like a good deal. The merger will happen, soon i believe. Besides, what can it hurt. I dont know. A little direction or help would be nice. Perhaps someone on here who is a broker can help me out? Thanks.

[SatCam]

If you are looking to start investing, first you should read up on it. How it works & all that.

for a first time investor, I think you will be discouraged with a stock like sirius and an investment of $100

If you are willing to sacrifice the benefits of a full service broker, you can use a discount broker like E*TRADE or Charles Schwab. At Schwab, for example, each trade will cost you $12.95. So if youre only putting down $100, that's a 12% fee. If youre buying $1000 worth of shares, that's only 1.2%

btw, Im not an expert, broker or trader or anything, just an interested party

[Recyclerz]

The bigger on-line trade places are at least as reliable as the traditional brokers. Here's a couple:

TDAmeritrade http://www.tdameritrade.com/welcome1.html

E*Trade https://us.etrade.com/e/t/home (I use them)

Sharebuilder http://content.sharebuilder.com/mgdcon/jump/Web/welcome/newwelc/index.htm

To be honest though, even the low commissions (and account fees are) going to eat you alive if you're just going to invest in the hundreds. Sharebuilders has the lowest commissions but you have limits on how often you can trade so its not ideal if you're taking a shot on a hot stock and may want to bail fast.

The "correct" way to invest in stocks is to consistently throw a little bit of money into a diversified portfolio (index mutual funds or ETFs) over a long period of time so that you take advantage of compounding and the likely continued growth in the world economies. Of course this is also the boring way. But such is life.

[NickyL0885]

If you are looking to start investing, first you should read up on it. How it works & all that.

for a first time investor, I think you will be discouraged with a stock like sirius and an investment of $100

If you are willing to sacrifice the benefits of a full service broker, you can use a discount broker like E*TRADE or Charles Schwab. At Schwab, for example, each trade will cost you $12.95. So if youre only putting down $100, that's a 12% fee. If youre buying $1000 worth of shares, that's only 1.2%

btw, Im not an expert, broker or trader or anything, just an interested party

When you say Ill be discouraged, what do you mean? Like, will i not make anything off it, even with a the merger?

[SatCam]

When you say Ill be discouraged, what do you mean? Like, will i not make anything off it, even with a the merger?

I'm not saying you can't make money off of it, but the fact is, is takes great risk ( ie a lot of money) to make a lot of money.



for every buyer there is a seller

[LordJezo]

The stock market itself is like gambling, you might make some money but then you will also lose lots. In the stock market you need tons of money to make anything and its pretty volatile if you start to get into stocks that swing wildly up and down. I have an account on both E*Trade and TD Ameritrade. E*Trade cost way too much for individual trades so I switched everything to TD. I hear good things about Scotrade and their low cost orders. I own Sirius stock myself because everyone thought it couldn't go any lower back when it was at $6 or $7. I figured I would do the same thing as you, pour in a bunch of money and wait until it skyrocketed. Yeah, that didn't work out too well. I am just waiting to get my balance with that one out of the red and dump it and be down with individual stocks. Although when the Iraq war broke out I did put money into Haliburton, Northrup Grunman, and ATK and made money off of them all, but that was the one time I got lucky.

Go with long term good growth mutual funds and set your investing time table to be 30 years instead of a quick day trader. You'll make on average 10% or more a year of compounding returns and set yourself up very nicely for retirement. You'll need about $2,000 a fund to get yourself started but then you can add to it as you please, set up automatic bank account deductions and let your earnings grow tax free so you'll have a nice nest egg when you are done. With this I use Vanguard, its a major company and they offer many no-cost to buy/sell funds. Open up a Roth IRA and just let it ride out for the next few decades and you'll be happy that you did.

[Freitag]

A few things:

Research, Research, Research. Study what you're investing in.

Look at the morningstar ratings, look at the risk vs. growth potential, etc.

Mutual Funds are smart, so are Target Date Mutual Funds.

I'll post more about this later.

[JPMNICK]

100 dollars is really not a viable amount to start with. at 10 bucks per trade, you need the stock to go up 9% just to break even. and then with account fees for having so little in there, you will probably lose money even if your stock goes up.

at this point you need to save some money, then take a % of that to put into stocks.

[Freitag]

One of my recommendations, is if you don't have one yet, is to start an IRA to "get your feet wet". You can still contribute to one now to catch a break on your 2007 taxes. That way, you can slowly get your feet wet in the market and begin to learn.