Stock Market Investing Tips - Online stock trading tips

Hello. My name is Mark Griffith, and this is a short introduction into trading stocks online. Buying and selling shares online is something that naturally you need to do through some kind of online portal, some of which are brokers. Some of which give direct access to shares traded in other ways. The important thing to consider is your own strategy. Why you're doing it. What kind of periods you'll plan to hold the shares for. How quickly you're going to sell them or buy them. Your own strategy, in other words, and the technicalities of what the brokerage offers you. For example, are you paying minimum trade fees? Are you paying fees that vary by how many lots you trade, which means how many shares at a time? Are there other restrictions on what you're doing? Once you're clear, what the deal is that you...that you're with, once you've compared a few people with whom you can trade online, and once you've decided what your own goals are, what your own strategy is, then you should go ahead. Always start small. Always be careful. Try to watch friends doing this if you can, and always start with some paper trading. The idea of paper trading is that you decide, "Oh, I would make a trade now", and rather than just vaguely imagining it, you write it down. And you actually rigorously keep to this, and you then decide ten minutes later, five minutes later, twenty minutes later, whether you would then close out your position or not. And you'd write down your profits and loss, your paper profits and loss, your imaginary profits and loss. It's very important to be disciplined about this, because it's easy to fool yourself. It's easy to persuade yourself, "Oh, I would've bought there and sold there and I would have made a profit." So, be disciplined, be careful, because it's very easy to lie to yourself, and when you start trading with actual money, your money, you'll start to feel the same panicky emotions that everybody else feels, and you'll find that your judgment's affected. So, always paper trade, always start small. Only invest what you can afford to lose, and learn as much as you can, both about general strategies, and about the terms that you're doing it on. Also if you're actually trading stocks and shares online, it's good to get some good charting, and different platforms, different online brokerages. A platform is....is like a window that opens where you actually execute the trades over the internet. Different platforms offer, some of them very good charts, some of them not so good. So decide what you're comfortable with before you actually dive in. And then, once you dive in and you've actually got your money in the account, carry on being careful because there's plenty to learn. There's plenty to learn. It's a craft, like anything else, and your own emotions are a very big part of the picture, so if you feel panicky, or if you feel nervous, or if you find that you're overreacting, maybe this is not something that you should be doing. Anyway, best of luck, be careful, and do as well as you can.