where can i buy stocks?

Answer 1

It depends on what stocks you want to buy... some businesses sell stocks through private placement and some are publicly traded. To purchase publicly traded stocks, you can purchase through a broker or a website. They usually charge you per trade. eTrade is one that comes to mind, but there are a bunch out there.

Answer 2

You usually buy them from a broker. Luckily, there are a lot of good brokerages depending on what you like and how you trade.

Barron's has a great article on brokerages that they publish each year. (Latest one was in March 6, 2006). Kiplinger does one too.

Here’s the link to the Barron’s article.
http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1550280182488.html

Here’s the link to the Kiplinger’s July 2006 article which isn’t bad either.
http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/07/brokers.html


For basic stuff, E*Trade, Ameritrade, and Scottrade are sufficient. For more complex trades, I'd recommend Optionsxpress, ThinkorSwim, or interactivebrokers.

Based on what you put in your question, I'd recommend one of the first three, but all are very good. Cheapest probably is scottrade (of the larger online firms). Yes there are cheaper like interactivebrokers, but you'll have to get used to their software based platform (which is doable). They're only about $1/contract on options!

Brokerages like Fidelity are horrible for anyone with any decent experience.

So, decide what's important to you as a trader and compare the brokers! You can use the article, or go to each website as they all seem to have comparison charts!

And if there are particular things that you want to mention as being most important to you (such as executions, cust svc, cheapest trade, flexibility on allowing you to do certain types of trades, stop and stop limit orders, contingent orders, great graphing, what if scenarios, training, etc), I'll be glad to help discuss this with you too!

If you have any questions, let me know.

Hope that helps!

Answer 3

You'll want to open a brokerage account. Both of the following:

www.tradeking.com
www.scottrade.com

charge low fees to buy and sell stocks and don't charge you a fee just for having an account (I think; make sure you read the fine print of the agreement.)

Answer 4

Just about anyplace today.

You can start with your bank, if you want more competitive prices, you can try online brokers:

e-trade, ameritrade, scottrade . . . . .