Learning About The Stock Market
Learning about the stock market is the first step for anyone wanting to invest their money. This brief Stock Market Tutorial will help you to learn how the stock market works and some of the common facts about it.
What is The Stock Market?
The stock market is simply a place where buyers and sellers come together to exchange stocks. Each stock represents a portion of the ownership of major companies.
Anyone can buy stock in a company and become partial owner of that company. Some companies even offer dividend paying stocks which send investors money every quarter or month as the company makes money.
As the value of the stock increases or decreases and as the company pays out a dividend investors make or lose money off of their investment. Here are a few Related Articles on “What Stocks are”
What Are Stocks
Stock Market For Beginners
Why Invest in Stock Market
Brokers
While there are some people who buy and sell stock certificates by hand the vast majority of the buying and selling occurs online through stock brokers. With a brokerage account you can easily buy and sell stocks with the click of the button.
All you need to do is enter the ticker symbol of the stock you wish to buy and click submit. For example if I wanted to buy Coke, I would enter their ticker symbol (KO) and click submit.
If you don’t know the symbol of the company you want to buy, just Google it. There are other ways but Google is the easiest and fastest way of finding a ticker symbol.
Although it may appear that your order get’s filled instantly, brokers do have to match you with another order before your order can be filled.
Luckily though the 10’s of trillions of dollars in the stock market exchanging hands and placing trades makes this pretty easy. For liquid stocks a good broker can fill your order in just a couple of seconds.
Brokers make things much easier and with most of them charging less than $10 per transaction they are well worth the cost. Here are some great articles on stock brokers.
10 Internet Stock Brokers Compared
Low Commission Stock Brokers
Canadian Stock Brokers
Stock Options
This learning about the stock market tutorial would not be complete without a brief introduction to stock options. Options give traders the right to buy and sell stocks at a given point in time.
It is basically a way of making (or losing) more from the stock market and if you are already have a firm grasp of the ABC’s of the stock market and how to make money with it then it can help you to bring in some added leverage. If you are interested in learning about stock market options here are a few articles to read.
Stock Options
How to Buy Stock Options
What Are Option Spreads?
What Are Mutual Funds
Most people start learning about mutual funds before they start learning about the stock market. This is because they are simple and don’t require much work. Mutual funds will basically do everything for you, for a fee. All money that is invested into a fund is then reinvested into things like stocks and bonds.
Mutual funds then charge a fee for investing your money and give the investors whatever profit is left after the fees. For a stock market tutorial on Mutual Funds here are a couple articles to read.
Types of Mutual Funds
Understanding Mutual Funds
Advantages of Mutual Funds
Fundamental Analysis
When learning about the stock market this is what most people expect to find. Fundamental analysis looks at how the company is doing and uses that information to make a reasonable guess on how the company’s stock will perform.
One of the most scientific aspects of this strategy is combining financial indicators together to ratios such as the Book Value, PE ratio, and Net Profit Margin and using this to determine if the stock is a good buy at its current price.
Technical Analysis
Another way to start learning about the stock market is to learn about the technical side. As the price of the stock goes up and down those points are plotted on a stock chart.
Technical traders look for patterns in these charts that reoccur and make decisions based off of these patterns. Some of the most common patterns are the chart patterns and candlestick patterns that have reoccurred in the market for hundreds of years and have proven to be effective.
If you want to learn about how the stock market works with Technical Analysis here are a couple of good articles to read.
How to Read Stock Charts
Easy to Read Stock Charts
Still have Questions?
If this stock market tutorial didn’t do it for you have no fear. You can always get more information in this stock market glossary or if you have questions you can ask them in this stock market questions and answers page.
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