[–] RedditDead2005-2015 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
If you don't think you'll have the time to read a "How To" book for the basics, there's plenty of Youtube vids with tutorials.
[–] rwbj 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
The educated opinion would be to not bother trying to personally beat the market. There are a lot of reasons for this but in general index funds (which are basically a blank investment across a wide array of major companies) tend to outperform any given individual. Buffet is now going into the 8th year of a 10 year million dollar wager he made with another individual. Previously mentioned individual got to pick out any group of hedge funds he liked. Buffet picked an index fund. Whoever was ahead after 10 years won. Here are the details. Here's an interesting writeup on it.
The index funds, as always, are stomping the hedge funds. And hedge funds are run by professional investors who are not infrequently busted engaging in insider trading and other such shenanigans. Yet they still can't beat the basic market. Play an investing simulator or whatever and you're basically just randomly gambling. It'll result in huge variance and if you end up on the positive side, which you will eventually, you'll think you're an investing genius when the reality is in today's market - nobody is.
Go with an index fund. It will be literally impossible to lose all your money, or even any major chunk of it, unless our economy completely flops in which case it will generally come back in short order as we artificially fill that bubble back up like after the 2009 recession through various economic games like quantitative easing or 'dumping tons of money into the economy and hoping things work out.' It's probably screwing our economy in the mid to long run, but it's basically viagra for stocks in the short run as when people have far more money than they know what to do with stocks are an easy option, and that creates artificial demand which artificially inflates the prices and makes all of our economic indicators look nice and pretty.
[–] RedditDead2005-2015 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
The best way to learn about the stock market is to start reading the financial news online or watching CNBC and other financial news shows on TV. If you don't have the time to follow them, then you shouldn't be trading stocks. You should just stick the money into a mutual fund.
First of all, which country are you in? In the U.S., there's places like E-Trade and other online discount brokerages. A 3% commission sounds too high even for a full service brokerage. Usually, people just getting into the stock market should stay away from individual stocks and stick with index stocks that follow a particular market index like DJIA, Nasdaq 100, S&P 500, etc.
[–] Peynus [S] ago
I'm UK atm. Move about Europe a bit. Any suggestions, then? Also; is there a free service of people monitoring stock prices?
[–] RedditDead2005-2015 ago
The free stock monitoring sites usually show prices which are delayed 5 minutes so it's not that useful for trading. I don't have the bookmarks with me right now, but you can find places of Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, CNBC, etc. for them. This place is also good for an market overview.