What does it mean to trade stocks?
Stocks market is not a new trade, it has been known for hundreds of years, just in different forms. Stock market is one of the essential foundations of any country’s economy. It started at first as a way to raise funds for the governments in exchange for infrastructure and public sector investments. Later on corporates have adopted the same mentality as well to expand their businesses or to acquire new markets. Eventually, people have developed so many ways to trade with paperless methods and software platforms were developed to serve this particular purpose.
To trade is to be part of this global community between parties who are raising funds in exchange for products or services and parties who are using that as an investment opportunities.
How to get into the trading business?
You need to have the will and passion for it, do you like numbers and have the wit mind to understand past trading strategies? You will need to read books about the successful traders, what they do, how they trade and in which industries and how to predict where is the market going? You need to be able to read historical data in order to be able to predict the performance, at least on the short term trading.
What does it mean to trade stocks as a beginner?
Well. Prepare yourself for a lot of studying! Some of the books recommended for beginners are “Market Wizard” and “The Intelligent Investor”. “Market Wizard” collects a lot of reviews, tips from most successful traders in the market and pick their minds about how to trade stocks successfully, while the latter is about the value of investing, a guide and a reference on how to trade stocks, policies, portfolios, investment funds, market fluctuations, pricing and trading strategies.
How to get starting with trading stocks?
Once you read and get to know all the basic stuff in theory, you start a demo account and get your hands dirty without risking any actual money, some traders allow you to see how they actually work step by step like Meir Barak, Tradenet founder. You can apply that on your demo account before going live with your ready-to-invest dimes!
Best Places to Trade Stocks
There are plenty of places that offer to sign up for a free demo account for a specific period or unlimited period of times before you actually need to sign up for real. There’s no best place – as well as there’s no best strategy but we will cover that later – all you have to do is look for each platform’s policies, market and industries they exchange in, if they specialize in something specifically, what kind of limitations they use and what’s the hedge fund available in it, privacy policy, legally licensed, commission or trading fees applied, … etc.
I will cover that in a latter article to help you decide. But as a beginner in trading stocks, you will be OK with a decent well known platform with an educational materials and offer some kind of support or good customer service and they have a good blog or a community to learn from. Trust me!
here’s a couple of websites you can get familiar with:
Learn how to trade stocks
You can be a specialized trader and work in the financial or brokerage firms, or you can do it as a personal investment for an hour or two per day or per week as you please. Either way, you will need a brokerage firm to trade through its system. You can always start with a demo account before signing up for the real money but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. You have to learn how to do it. It is not just as Monica Giller says “Buy sell high low”, do not count on “luck” here!
Do your homework first!
One hour of trading stocks
It is highly recommended that you spend one hour every day on a demo account and another hour of reading or watching successful traders in action before starting trading your real money. It is going to be challenging at first, you might lose everything but eventually you will get the sense of how it works and do it blind. Or that is the hope.
Emy 