Summary Ok new investor, you should be ready to begin. You can now leave the bleachers, put on a uniform, cross the white lines, and play. Stay focused, positive, and realistic. You might not make the Majors right away, but you can enter the investment world armed with solid knowledge, upon which you can expand Read More…

You should have a “game plan” for your investing life. Just as you plan your workday, vacation, college financing, golf matches, and other areas of your personal and professional life, you need a plan, objective, and goal for your investment activities. Spend some quality time with yourself, thinking about what you really want to accomplish. Read More…

Unfortunately, when it comes time to file your tax return, the IRS wants to know how much money you made or lost in your brokerage account. Your brokerage firm will even report to the IRS your total proceeds from all of your sales of stocks, but they don’t report your gains and losses. The reason Read More…

In its simplest form, short selling is selling shares that you don’t own. Just like the broker will loan you cash to buy more shares, the broker will also loan you shares that you can sell. When you [ts]sell short[tm]Borrowing shares from your broker to sell a stock that you don’t own with the hope Read More…

When you are opening a real brokerage, you will be asked if you want to open a Margin Account. Buying on margin means that you purchase securities using some of your own cash and you take a loan from your broker to complete the purchase. The collateral for the loan is the stocks or cash Read More…

As you might expect, just because you place an order, it does not necessarily get executed. Both the timing and the duration of your orders are important to successfully managing your portfolio. When you place the orders mentioned above, you will usually be allowed to specify the duration of the order. You might be placing Read More…

Once you have the ticker symbol for the company you wish to trade, you are ready to place your first order. Go to your virtual trading account and you’ll see several options for order type—market, limit and stop. You have already found the symbol to trade “LUV” and you can enter any quantity of shares to Read More…

You can easily use the quote page on your brokerage account to locate stocks you might want to buy. If you know the ticker symbol you want to buy, or know the co mpany’s name, you should be successful in locating the current price and status of any publicly traded security. Remember, some companies have Read More…

The first thing you must understand about trading stocks is that the exchanges have assigned each stock a unique “ticker symbol” for identification purposes. When researching stocks, getting quotes, and placing trades, you usually have to know the ticker symbol. Stock ticker symbols are usually 1 to 5 letters long. (Occasionally they contain a “.” Read More…