Re: Please help a beginner out!
i do have a job at coles i get paid about 60- 120$ a week not much but im not paying eny tax or board or enything so i get it all. and i thought that was right i just wanst all sure and if i was to invest how much should i invest for how long or does that depend on how the market is going?
Hello ilyuck,
You sound so much like my youngest son it's scary.
At age 12 he worked as a Trolley Boy at KMart and like yourself was keen to "get into the stockmarket" with his free cash.
Having been a stockmarket investor myself since age 20 I appreciated the benefits and dangers of this form of investment. But relalising how easily a young man can "blow" his hard earned cash on junk, I felt that he might as well blow it on something that would give him a better understanding of the financial world and possibly earn him a bit better than bank interest.
I took him to my Stockbroker who suggested he buy a small parcel of Pioneer Concrete (about $180 worth at the time which would probably exrapolate to about $1000 in todays money).
He earned a couple of dividends from Pioneer and ended selling the parcel at a nice little profit a couple of years later and reinvested in another stock which also performed well - Caltex I think.
The major benefit of this was that because he had a personal holding, he learned to study a Balance Sheet, learned a lot about the market terminology, and gained some understanding of how the economy and the world of business operates.
I am sure it influenced his thinking and enthusiasm at school and allowed him to relate his studies to the real world. He completed secondary education as one of the top students at his school and then followed with Degrees in Accounting and Business Law.
Some 25 years later neither of us are millionaires but I am sure we are much better off that we would have been without the benefit of the stockmarket.
My advice - Read, Read, Read everything you can lay your hands on. Only invest what you can afford to lose and keep some cash for a rainy day. Buy only (at good value) stocks that regularly pay a good fully franked dividend.
I have mainly looked at investing for the long term. There are a lot of smarter people than me around who seem to do well at Trading (which requires a different technique). There are so many sources of information available today you could go mad trying to unravel them. Every stock has a good reason to Buy or Sell at the moment.
I turn to this site Aussie Stock Forums for a good balanced view of different stocks and investing strategies. I also use many other sites that I will not mention here.
I hope this encourages you have a go within your means.
Good Luck