I would like to START INVESTING??? I need HELP???

Question

Hi Friends, I am at that age where I should start investing. I am completely new to the field so I would be grateful if some one can please give me help and guidance:

Where and how do I start out?
What first actions do I take?
What do I plan for?

that kind of thing.

Ideally I would like to invest in equities (stocks and shares), fixed incomes (bonds), property etc. I realise that I won't be able to do all this straight away. I realise that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

If someone has any useful websites, books, etc that would truly be perfect.

Thanks friends

Answer 1

The best place to start to learn about investing is at financial website "The Motley Fool".
Here's the UK Version:
http://www.fool.co.uk/investments/investments.aspx
The article in particular to look at being this one:
http://www.fool.co.uk/school/2006/sch060130.htm

And here is the original USA version:
http://www.fool.com/investing.htm

2 other good places to start learning the ropes are:
http://www.everyinvestor.co.uk
+
http://www.investopedia.com

To start learning how to trade UK shares without putting your own money at risk, there a BRILLIANT fantasy UK stockmarket game @ http://www.bullbearings.co.uk

In the UK, the best place for people just starting out in investing in the UK stockmarket is the HALIFAX SHAREBUILDER account, franchised to HBOS from the US original @ sharebuilder.com (Motley Fool UK also run a version of Sharebuilder, which appears to be run by the Halifax with MOTLEY FOOL branding on it when you look at the small print on the promo page):
http://www.halifax.co.uk/sharedealing/sharebuilder.asp

For investing books, I've cobbled together a decent selection (sold through Amazon.co.uk) on my website:
http://astore.amazon.co.uk/jdcouk-books-21/203-9338484-3266364?_encoding=UTF8&node=31

Further investing hints:
1) You should ideally have 2 bank accounts....... 1 a "current account" for everyday transactions (paying bills, etc), the other a "savings account" (e.g. Halifax Websaver) to hold the bulk of the money you don't immediately need, and earn a nice amount of interest on.... typical current account only usually pays 0.1% interest a year, a savings account 4.75% and over per year. So, £100 in a current account would earn you 10p.... while the same amount in a savings account could earn you £5 or more.
http://www.fool.co.uk/current-accounts/compare-all-current-accounts.aspx
http://www.fool.co.uk/savings/compare-savings-accounts.aspx

2) When you buy & sell shares, you generally have to pay a commission fee....... the more you buy & sell, the more of these you pay...... and the more of these you pay, the more it eats into any profit you make. It's also why with traditional brokers charge around £10 commission you generally have to blow £500 - £1000+ on a share purchase, while you can get away with £20 - £120(ish) with the Sharebuilder account (£1.50 to buy, £5 to sell).

3) Before placing real money on shares, ALWAYS research the company first to see how they stack up. The best place I've found to do this is at http://quote.fool.co.uk and to look at the "Forecast" + "Fundamentals" sections to get a general idea of how a company I'm thinking of investing is likely to do over the next couple of years, and whether or not I should give it a wide berth. Though sometimes it's worked like a dream, and I've made 40% - 245% profit on a few shares I hold, while other times things have happened along the way to throw a spanner in the works, and give me losses of up to 80%..... so ALWAYS keep an eye on what's going on via places such as http://finance.yahoo.com

4) Some companies, usually well established ones pay a "dividend" to investors, which is when they hand back a chunk of company profits they've got burning a hole in their pockets back to investors. The more shares you hold, the more you get...... so if they're getting paid out at 10p a share, and you hold 4 shares in that company, you earn 40p for doing nothing.
Usually the dividend is anything from 1p - £1.12 per share.
Some good UK stocks for getting dividend are:
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) - goes up to £1.12 per share next year
Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS.L) - 51p per share next year
Lloyds TSB (LLOY.L)
Severn-Trent Water (SVT.L)
and there's plenty of others if you hunt around

When you get paid dividend money, it's generally best to put it towards buying a few more shares in that company so you're entitled to even more dividend money next time it's being paid out.

Answer 2

www.fool.com or www.fool.co.uk.

This is The Motley Fool website - very highly respected.

Magic phrase: "compound interest" - look it up on the internet, the graphs (especially after some time) make pretty interesting reading.

If you are interested in shares you might want to start with an index tracker (passive investing - basically replicates the constituents of the stockmarket) that has very low charges. You can get them with 0.5% or lower annual charges. You can set up a monthly direct payment and re-invest the profits and forget about it for a decade.

You can try to be an active investor, but what makes you so much more intelligent than everybody else who is trying to make some money on the stockmarket? If the answer is "nothing" then well done, that is a good indication not to bother. If, however, you think you really are more intelligent than the other active investors then you are in good company - so do they!

Very few actively managed funds actually beat the index trackers. You are just paying huge fees for the fund managers' sports cars. Same goes for an awful lot of so-called Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs) who may only be selling you stuff for the fat commision they earn.

Remember shares are a long-term bet. If the market crashes the year after you put your money in you need to be able to wait 5-10 years for your investment to be profitable. Or loger - look at the Japanese stockmarket over the past twenty years. So don't get yourself in the situation where you don't have spare cash for emergencies and are forced to cash in your shares (or index tracker units) when you don't want to, like when the market is down.

Be very suspicious of any kind of scheme that charges lots of fees upfront, or penalises you for leaving early.

Personally I wouldn't touch domestic property investment with a barge-pole at the moment - price to wages ratios are off the scale. I've been thinking the bubble is going to burst for about five years now, god help us all when it finally does. It may well be starting in the states with all that sub-prime mortgage stuff going on now. A guy working for the UK's central bank recently admitted they had to let property prices run rampant over the last five years just to keep up the feelgood factor and avoid a recession!

Anyway good luck. And remember a profit is only theoretical until you've sold whatever it is and got the cash in your bank account...

Answer 3

I was paying a broker too much money for what I was getting. I decided to let go of my broker (in October 2008- which is significant) and invest on my own. My bank offers on-line banking. I made an appointment with the investment banker and she showed me the ropes. I do my own research and I decide which stocks I will buy. I like having the control to buy and sell stocks and I have some good hunches that have made me a nice profit. There are sites that charge a nominal fee, and I truly mean nominal, like $7.00 for a transaction but I prefer investing through my bank. My stock portfolio is there at a click of a button along with my banking. I think you might like going through your bank if you are new to investing. Good luck.

Answer 4

You can't succed in binary trading without a strategy, a good method to follow and some kind of software support. They program I use is called "Autobinary signals". It helps finding loopholes for guaranteed returns. It's very easy to use and I'm earning good money. You find all the details on this site: http://tradingsignal.toptips.org

Answer 5

First of all you need to learn to play the bull market then you can learn to play with the bear market. You must get Stock Investing for Dummies, and 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success these books are worth every penny.Also you are going to want to set up an online account to better understand what they are talking about in the books you will have visual picture. do not set up margin account I have the best online broker there is and they are very cheap. If you email me I will send you right to them and let you know how to set it up and you don't have to deposit money till you are ready. my email is [e-mail] They are the best I have found and I am more than happy with there service. I can help you out finding the things you will need to know on the site.

Answer 6

I suggest you start with an equity based ISA from one of the larger financial houses - Fidelity for example. You can invest up to £7,000 in each financial year, and you have just enough time to catch this year's deadline (April 5th)

The great thing about ISAs -apart from the interest being tax free - is that you can have access to your money in an emergency, but if you hang on to them, they are a great alternative and augmentation to a pension

Answer 7

you can invest in forex (forign exchange) but you must be carful , and don't start without opening a demo account and get a good learn then you can go ahead

Answer 8

Everyone gave good suggestions. I would suggest watching "Mad Money" on CNBC. If you are in America, it comes on CNBC everyday at 7 and midnight, E.S.T. He is a great teacher.

Answer 9

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/index.phtml
Have a look round this site including the forums it should give you a few pointers.

Answer 10

Hi,

Risk avoidance is the name of the game.

Remember, the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Penny stocks are great, but I would avoid the ones under a dollar a share. For example, Best Buy started at less than $5. So there are some good companies, but it takes a lot of digging to find the good ones. You are looking for companies with good earnings, little debt, low capitalization, and good P/Es. For stocks under $5, very few will meet these requirements.

Stay away from the pharms unless they have patented drugs - do not invest in generic pharms, no growth there.

Check out which business sectors are the most popular and invest in the companies in those sectors. The number one, two and three are: technology, health care, and cyclicals (retail). These change every few months.

Watch CNBC, but don't pay too much attention to the talking heads, except for Jim Cramer, the wild man - but he tries to teach you how to invest and has some great advice.

Get Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World by James J. Cramer

Listen to Jim Cramer on CNBC.com

Go to Clearstation for quotes and tutorials on investing at (http://clearstation.etrade.com/). Sign up is free.

Get this book: Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond (Wiley Finance) by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin, and Michael van Biema.

Another good book: The Motley Fool Investment Guide for Teens: 8 Steps to Having More Money Than Your Parents Ever Dreamed Of (Motley Fool) by David Gardner, Tom Gardner, and Selena Maranjian

Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich by James J. Cramer and Cliff Mason

I Want to Make Money in the Stock Market: Learn to Begin Investing Without Losing Your Life Savings! by Chris M. Hart\

Sensible Stock Investing: How to Pick, Value, and Manage Stocks by David P. Van Knapp

Stock Investing For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance)) by Paul Mladjenovic

All About Stock Market Strategies : The Easy Way To Get Started by David Brown and Kassandra Bentley

The Motley Fool Investment Guide and their Web site (http://www.fool.com/).

The Little Black Book of Microcap Investing: Beat the Market with NASDAQ/AMEX Microcap Stocks, OTCBB Penny Stocks, and Pink Sheet Stocks by Dan Holtzclaw

How To Make Money In Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times or Bad, 3rd Edition by William J. O'Neil

Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management by Alexander Elder

Big Trends in Trading: Strategies to Master Major Market Moves (A Marketplace Book) by Price Headley

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds (Paperback)
by Charles Mackay (Author), Andrew Tobias (Foreword) This book talks about the Tulip craze in Holland where people would mortgage their homes to buy Tulip bulbs. Same thing happened in 2001 - 2002 with the Internet bubble that brought the stock market to its knees. The dot com companies were the Tulip bulbs.

Buy Investors Business Daily. It has lots of tutorials and I like it better than the stodgy Wall St Journal.

Money Game by Adam Smith

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings (Wiley Investment Classics) (Hardcover)
by Philip A. Fisher. Recommended by Warren Buffet who took $100,000 and grew it to $34 billion!

Value Investing with the Masters by Kirk Kazanjian

Valuegrowth Investing by Glen Arnold

The 5 Keys to Value Investing by J. Dennis Jean-Jacques

The Intelligent Investor Rev Ed. (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffet was his student at Columbia.

The Money Masters by John Train

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore

Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor by John C. Bogle

Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics by Gary Belsky

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! by Phil Town . See his Web site at (http://www.ruleoneinvestor.com/). Free sign-up. I got the book at the library.

Listen. You don't have to spend a lot of money on these books - most can be found at your library and those that your library doesn't have they can usually get from other libraries in your state.

Most of these books talk about stock and mutual fund investing, but for a good introduction to other forms of investing Gerald Appel has a great book called Opportunity Investing - How to Profit When Stock Advance, Stocks decline, Inflation Run Rampant, Prices fall, Oil Prices Hit the Roof and Every Time In Between.

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman Not a book on investing, but it's a nice segue into the next book.

Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance by Marcus Buckingham

Finding your strengths is important when investing. These books teach you to build on your strengths, what you a good at. Everyone is good or passionate about something. Why not get better at what you are good at?

Another good book is: Opportunity Investing: How To Profit When Stocks Advance, Stocks Decline, Inflation Runs Rampant, Prices Fall, Oil Prices Hit the Roof, ... and Every Time in Between (Hardcover)
by Gerald Appel

Most mutual funds do not even keep up the the return on the S&P. That's like 99% of them.

Vanguard Index funds are a no brainer.

A CD is better than a savings account. They range from six months to several years. You cannot touch your money tho until the time limit is up.

Check out this Web site on Direct Investment Plans where you can buy shares directly from companies: (http://www.fool.com/School/DRIPs.htm). Usually no fees and you can buy one share at a time.

Kindest Personal Regards,

Walt Brown
Site Build It Certified Webmaster
[e-mail]

P.S. This is a life-long learning process. Reading these books and applying the rules to analyzing stocks that may be good It takes time. Be patient and keep reading and listening.

P.P.S. Internet has lots of good stuff, for example (http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:technical_indicators:moving_average_conve
Stockcharts.com is very good and their discussion of MACD is one of the best, barring its originator, Gerald Apple, but now we are getting into Technical Analysis and that is not for beginners.