Donald CA on January 21, 2012 at 12:07 pm

read Peter Lynch’s book, if you want to invest, and not speculating the market.

seawaguy on January 21, 2012 at 12:45 pm

The simple case for index funds is part theory, part practice, and part arithmetic. Theory says that since (a) gross returns earned by investors as a group must equal the gross returns earned by the total stock market, (b) net returns – after advisory fees and other investment expenses – earned by investors as a group must fall short of the returns of the market by the amount of those costs.

Practice confirms the theory. Returns earned by the average equity mutual fund in the past have typically fallen short of the returns on appropriate stock market indexes by an amount approximately equal to the operating expenses and transaction costs incurred by the funds. Over the past 25 years, the average fund has earned annual returns averaging 11.6% compared to a return of 13.1% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index, a shortfall of 1.5 percentage points per year. In fact, only 32% of actively managed equity funds have outpaced this unmanaged index, and no one has ever suggested a methodology by which those few winners could have been selected in advance.

And simple arithmetic makes it clear that this difference is critically important. Over 25 years, a $ 10,000 investment in the Index would have risen in value to $ 217,100, compared to $ 155,500 in the average fund. This shortfall – $ 61,600 – is clearly enormous. For over time, the miracle of compounding changes a difference in degree in annual return to a difference in kind in capital accumulation. Costs matter. That sums up the simple case for index funds.

Stuart L on January 21, 2012 at 12:57 pm

You need to do a lot of reading first.

The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham
Beating The Street by Peter Lynch
Anything by / about Warren Buffett

You need to understand you. Do you like the idea of investing for income or growth? Do you want to trade or invest? How risk averse are you? How long can you tie your money up for?

Ideally, you will need to get an understanding of business, accountancy, statistics, annual reports, stock market history, economics and more.

No need to rush. If I were you, I’d give yourself a year or more of reading and research to understand some of the theory a little more before you should worry about buying anything.

Good luck.

sai p on January 21, 2012 at 1:40 pm

hi Anita
ur anxiety in stokes is good.u wan to learn about investing in stokes.my advice is to just go trough the stokes for some time with full concentration, so that u will get self confidence on u that u can do trading on ur own.then u can start trading on ur own.i said this for u because this is the business related to gambling so that no one can predict this until they get the result that they win r loose at the end of the day.

roli on January 21, 2012 at 1:46 pm

Go to any stock broker and they would be more than willing to talk to you.just talk to many of them and don’t restrict your self to one.

yellow_beaver on January 21, 2012 at 1:49 pm

go be a fool…….this site is comprehensive and easy to understand:

http://www.fool.com/school/basics/basics.htm?source=InvAg