Income Tax Rates

The way you buy stocks has changed a lot in the last 10 years. It used to be that you had to find and contact a broker, probably go into their office in your city, open an account, and then arrange to have funds transferred. Every time you wanted to buy or sell a stock, you had to pick up the phone and tell you broker what you wanted to have done. Actually meeting up with someone and having to call them to make trades might have been a bit intimidating for a beginner.

Todays investor never has to have any contact with a real person if they dont want to. The computer and Internet has allowed the stock market game to change drastically and people can do everything themselves by just pushing a few buttons. Some may argue that buying and selling stock has become too easy because it allows people to have a gambling mentality. Day trading was an offshoot of this as people learned how to buy and sell back stocks within minutes, something they would have never done in years past with the old system.

If you are just starting out in your investing career, where should you go to learn more and get good advice? Other than the Internet, the public library always has some good investing books that will explain the basics of the stock market and some investment strategies you may want to explore. The Internet has information on anything and there will be abundance on stocks, but you must be careful what advice you pay attention to as there will be a lot of questionable content there as well.

Once you have studied some stock market basics for a while, it could be a good time to get started buying a stock. You can read and learn all you want but nothing is a substitute for the real thing. On the job learning is the best teacher and that goes for the stock market too.

However, now is probably a tough time psychologically to start buying stocks beginners because the market has had such a bad run. When the market was going up every day, buying a stock for the first time was easy because you expected it to go up more. Any beginner had the feeling that whatever they bought would be a winner. Right now though, the atmosphere and feeling is probably just the opposite of that. Although it is good to buy stocks when they are low, it is hard to buy something that you know might not be worth as much tomorrow as it is today. Stocks have been so relentless in going down over the last year that a beginner might want to get in but be very scared.