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By muncie birder on Jun 27, 2009 | Reply

A good deal depends on the amount of money that you have to invest and the amount of risk you are willing to take. For most people getting started should begin with mutual funds. This is because many only require $500 to begin an initial investment.
Yahoo has an excellent site to research mutal funds. See below. Go there and enter your screen critera. I suggest entering a Morning Star rating of 4 to 5 and a ytd return of at least 10% over 5 years.
When I did that I filtered out more than 100 mutual funds that met these critera. I have to tell you that a 10% return over the last 5 years is nothing to sneeze at. Some of these funds have a front end load and some do not. I prefer funds with no load, that is no sales charge. You can purchase these directly from the fund itself.
If you wish to invest directly in stocks, this has advatages and disadvantages.
Advantages: you learn more about the stock market buying and selling stocks rather than mutual funds. Some of those leasons can be painful. I tell you this from personal experience. You do not pay a management fee. Mutual funds charge a management fee, some as high as 2% annually. Mutual funds tend to track the market in general because they have so much money to invest. What would you do if you had to invest $2 billion dollars? If you do your research and do not ride your losses you can beat the mutual funds by directly buying stocks but it takes a lot of research and a lot of time so many just buy mutual funds. Also you have to pay a brokerage commision to buy and sell stocks about $30 round trip through an on line firm. On a $1000 investment that is 3%.
Yahoo has excellent information about stocks. It is my favorite site. You can set up any number of portfolios and track their results. You can research stocks. There are many on line brokerage firms and many offer various amounts of research material including S&P reports on companies.
If you wish to buy stocks rather than mutual funds, I suggest you do some research and read a few books on investing in the stock market. Your library will have several. Set up some test portfolios on Yahoo and see how you do. The problem with test protfolios is that you kick yourself when one contains a stock that goes up 20 points in a month and you did not actually own it. I know.
I must caution you that I personally know people who have lost a LOT of money on the stock market mainly because they did not think stock could also go DOWN.

By Phil on Jun 27, 2009 | Reply

Learn how to read and analyze financial statments. Learn how to do cross sectional analysis(peer and benchmark), and trend analysis, as well as some important ratios for ratio analysis. And remember that ratios are red flags and not solutions to problems. And finally learn how to value stocks using different stock valuation models to determine if a stock is overvalued or undervalued.

By Demiurgi on Jun 27, 2009 | Reply

In addition to Phil’s suggestion of Technical analysis, I would recommend starting a virtual portfolio. I found http://www.investopedia.com to be extremely helpful. Check it out.

By sparks_m on Jun 27, 2009 | Reply

No the refrigerated stuff goes first

By bunnys2l on Jun 27, 2009 | Reply

The best way to get started in a stock market is to do the stuff that is not cold like chips and soda Then when your done with that stuff you do the cold stuf like milk,butter,and cheese.