Your thoughts?

Having your money in the bank is a safe option, but I say nothing ventured nothing gained (though I say it for myself, not necessarily for everyone). We are all different, I would not have learned anything much without having put some real money down. Paper trading would never have worked for me. I started out with less than $2k (which left me with little more in the bank than I needed for fuel and food until my next pay cheque a couple of weeks later). Having real money on the market made me take close notice of what was going on, and after a few weeks I sold out, making a "whopping" $300 profit or something. Full of encouragement I put half of my next couple of pay cheques in, traded speculative shares holding for between a few hours and a few days at a time, and for about the next six weeks made over $1,000 every week - I was fairly clever and extremely lucky (though was naive enough to think it the other way around). Full of confidence (which I probably shouldn't have been) I made a few stupid decisions and lost a good deal of what I made (as was predicted by other members here I might say), but I remained ahead, have added fairly little of my own money since early on, and now have tens of thousands of dollars worth of shares - enough for a deposit on a house. Had I chosen to wait until I had $5k-10k to play with, I probably would still be looking at the money in the bank without the confidence to put risk it on something I didn't understand, and if I did it would be into blue chip shares because I'd be too scared to do anything else. For me, putting $1,200 or so on the line out of the $1,500 I had to my name at the time was the best thing I could have done, even though it might have been a stupid move from an advanced strategic point of view. If we don't give it a go as a novice we're never going to advance (assuming we're like Sdaji and don't take it seriously unless it's real, which may not describe you).

If you are comfortable losing $2,000 and you are very keen to learn about the stock market and get involved, I would suggest jumping in. You'll learn a lot faster, and if you're anything like me you will see the $2,000 as money well spent on learning, although I am a risk taker by nature, which isn't true of everyone. If you don't really want to get right into trading and just want to park your money somewhere, the bank is probably the best place.

Good onya coffee, a good decision to make which will free you up to educate yourself and read as much as you can without blowing your dough.

And you`re never too young, or too old to keep on learning.

Sdajii thanks for your thoughts. While this is tempting to try, I think I will be logical for a wee bit longer until I learn a little more about some companies. I plan to set up a watch list and see how my intuition would lead me, without actually jumping in.

I'm curious though - what shares did you sink you $1200 into? I am always interested to see where people started out (is there a thread on this anywhere?).

Also, is there somewhere that I can look up the minimum investment amount that a company will take? (in the event that I change my mind )

Perfectly reasonable, and for most people, sensible.

I started out with a few ideas about what would be good to buy into, but had no idea how to actually buy, sell, look up information, etc. The first company I bought into was one I knew absolutely nothing about, it was a "sure thing" tip from a friend, which I blindly followed, and initially all it taught me was how to use the Westpac broking system (though for my first few weeksof active day trading I didn't realise I could get real time market depth information and exclusively used nothing more than the 20 minute delay price quotes on ASX! Amazingly, I did this extremely successfully!). Looking back at it now, I could see where my friend was coming from. The company had declared an off market buy back at about 50% above the current trading price. It took a while for the market to respond, and I sold out before the buy back went ahead. My friend bought massively more than I did, held on for the buy back (which was undersubscribed) and did very nicely indeed.

After that I started trading speculative biotech stocks, taking risks far more extreme than I realised, making profits far more lucky than I realised. Since then I've lost a fair bit on biotech (though less than I have made), lost a lot on CSS (which I knew was very risky but failed to realise was run by fraudulent scum - expensive lesson there, but a lesson well learned), made a bit on banks (blue chip, low risk), made a fair bit on energy (a mixture of luck and research), made a bit on commodities (again, a mixture of luck and research, as well as some advice from a friend).

I have never tried to buy as little as $1,200 after my first buy, but as far as I know you can buy quantities far smaller than any sensible person would bother with. The problem with small volumes is that you get wiped out by brokerage. I think you said you were going to use Comsec or Westpac, each of those will whack you with $29.95 per trade ($59.90 to buy then sell), regardless of whether you want a tiny amount or up to about $10-20k or something (my largest single trades so far have been just under $10k, I'm not sure where it gets more expensive). Buying anything under about $1-2k, your $60 in brokerage is going to hurt, as you're immediately down 3-6%.