One strategy that should be followed is never investing all of you capitol into one or two companies. The typical amount of money invested in a company should not surpass 20% of your total portfolio. Keeping your portfolio diversified will help prevent major losses during any particular time. Invest your money within several different sectors (ie: commodities, equities, precious metals and bonds).

The buy and hold method is a strategy that doesn’t require too much work. Yes of course you’ll still have to do your research into the fundamentals of the company. What I don’t like about this type of investing is the fact that you are not paying attention to what is really go on with your investment. If you what to make the most out your investments, you need to be active and watch what the company as well as the overall market is doing

Shorting stocks is one of the more popular ways to play the market. The idea is that a trader believes that a certain company’s stock price is going to go down in price. A treader will go ahead and borrow share from an investor. Within a certain period of time, the trader will have to replace the shares he borrowed. The trader in turn sell the shares at the current price. When the price per share has dropped, the trader will buy shares to return to the investor. This type of trading is not for those who are just starting out in the stock market. You’ll need to get a good understanding of the stock market before you start shorting stocks.

After you’ve been trading stocks for some time you might want to look at day trading. Be careful though, many average investors have lost more money than they’ve made doing day trading. You need to be quick and alert to what is going on in the markets on a daily basis. Many day trader will trade penny stocks because of the higher percentages that can be made in a day, but you can lose just as much just as quick.

Whichever stock market trading strategy you decide to use, make sure you do your due diligence and follow the news on the companies you’re invested in.

1. Research and Due Diligence
This is a must if you want to be successful in trading stocks and investing in your future. Before you buy any shares of any company, you must know how fundamentally solid they are as a business. Look at their balance sheets and their financial reports. Any company traded on any of the major indicies must report periodically to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). Are they profitable? What kind of guidance are they given for the near (next Quarter) and the distant (annually) future.

2. Buy and Hold
The name speaks for itself. Once you find a company that has great growth potential and has a good grasp of their industry, you buy stocks of the company and hold on to them for a long period. This strategy doesn’t work out in cases where an investor puts his money in just before the markets go through a correction period like we saw in 2007 -2009.

3.Day Trading
Another strategy that isn’t hard to understand the concept by the name. This type of trading is not wise for the new investors and traders to get involved with. You need to understand the markets as a whole before doing so. In a unstable market, the price per share for most companies fluctuate greatly to give opportunities to experience traders to make money

4. Trailing stop
I like doing this type of treading in almost any type of market. In doing a trailing stop you are trying minimize your loses especially when you don’t have the time to monitor your portfolio on a regular basis.
When you put in a buy order (limit or market) with a trailing stop you must include a sell activation price too. If you buy 100 shares of XYZ Corp. at $35 per share, and you set your sell price by either percentage or points of the price of the stock. Let’s say we put a trailing stop of $1.00. as the price moves up in value, the sell price moves up also. If the stock moves up to $40 per share your sell price will be $39. If the stock comes down without going below the activation price if $39, you will still hold to those shares. Once it falls below the activation price, the sell order will trigger.
If instead it never falls below $1.00 of the highest price it hits once you’ve placed the order, you will continue to make gains in the stock and minimize your loses.

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When I started trading stocks I knew who I was investing in, typically a once private company that grew to trade publicly on one of the exchanges. I would do my research on each company I wanted to invest in. After reading their financial reports and their balance sheets, I would decide if the company can and would make a profit as it grew even bigger. At that time I would build a position in the company stock in hopes of making a profit for myself.

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So with the way things are today, we can all use some help. My advice to you is not to just stick with a narrow range of places to get the information. There are so many legitimate websites that you have to your advantage that investor of twenty years ago didn’t have. One of the sites that I use is Yahoo finance. Since they are no small presence on the internet, I can find up-to-the-minute information and news releases on companies that I’m invested in or ones that I’m still researching.

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Many seasoned investors and traders know about TheStreet.com, a website site that Jim Cramer help start a few years ago. Jim Cramer has been active in the stock market for many decades and knows what he’s talking about. He also predicted the bottom of the stock market (6500-6700) just weeks before the stock market started plunging. Click the above links, or the banner below to start your free trial of Action Alert and start taking charge of your investments.

One of the key thing you need to know before you start trading stocks is that you need to do research on each of the companies that you want to invest in. You can’t just say I like a particular stock and buy shares of the company. You have to know if the company is doing the right thing and making a profit. Is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) a successful businessman? Does he have what it takes to make the right call for the benefit of the company and it’s shareholders? Is the industry that the company in on an upswing or head in a downward motion? A company can be doing the right thing, but if the industry and it’s competitors have a bumpy road ahead of them because of the economy, it’s most likely that they may suffer along with the rest of them. Of course that is not the case all the time, but it can play into the price of the company’s stock.

When you go to build a position in the company, you must do it incrementally. You have to figure out how much you are going to invest in the company (usually no more than 20% of your portfolio). Buy 20% first just in case the stock pulls back a little. After a healthy pull back (typically 5-8%) you invest another 30-50% of your total investment in the company. if it continues to pull back, well then you buy the remaining shares to help lower your cost basis ( average price per share).

Another Stock market basic you need to realize is that there is no sure thing as a good stock tip. If anyone has inside information on a certain stock, they wouldn’t be telling you. It’s against the Security Exchange Commission law to divulge any information that could give anyone a leg up on the other investors. Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading within her own company.

In future posts I will list a few other stock investing basics to help you get better and to make more money in the stock market.

When I started trading stocks years ago, there weren’t so many websites available that I could go to to get my research done. I used to (and still do) subscribe to IBD (Investor Business Daily). A newspaper which would cover everything I needed to know about the stocks I was investing in as well as other that I was thinking about building a position in. I would also call the companies and speak to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). As years went on that all changed. I can now go to dozens of websites to find everything that I need to know about the stock market. I do on some occasions still call the company to get a good idea of what the company is up to.

But what websites do you go to to get what you really need and omit the unnecessary information? Everyone need a stock market guide to help them make the right decisions, but be careful. I know that there are many sites out there that offer to send you e-mails on a daily basis to clue you in on the hottest stocks of the day, but the problem is that most of them are only out there to make a buck for themselves.

The internet has come so far that every company (big or small) has their own website. That is one of the first places you should go when you’re doing your research on a particular stock. If you what to know which ones I use, it will be a very short list. There are only two websites that I use to get any news wire information on a daily basis. The first one is Yahoo Finance and the other is TheStreet.com. Both site offer many tools and up to date information on all stocks that are traded on the major indicies as well as the Pink Sheets and OTC:BB (penny stocks) Why else go anywhere else with two great sites?

Using other websites can give you more work than you need to do when it comes to doing your research.

First, one must understand the basics and the foundation of stocks. Stocks are nothing more than parts of ownership in a company. Basically, a company offers stocks to the public to finance their company. Buying stock makes you a shareholder, and in essence, you own part of the company even if you are buying penny stocks.

There are different types of stock that one could buy. First is common stock. Common stock is exactly as it is stated, common, and holds no preferences. When the company offers a dividend, you are entitled to it. The next step up is preferred stock, which means you get a higher priority when it comes to dividends, meaning you get paid first.

Voting / participating stock is also available, where you can vote on issues of the corporation. Stocks of large publicly traded companies are traded on the open market, at such places such as the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, etc. At the New York Stock Exchange, deals are done face to face in person. Prices are determined by an auction format in essence, meaning whoever pays the most, gets the stock. While this is going on, people can sell stocks at that price, and you are actually “trading” stocks. You may never meet the person you are trading with, but in essence that is what happens in two separate transactions.

Stocks can change constantly, due to many different things. It works on supply and demand, meaning if more people want a stock, the stock prices go up, and conversely, less interest equals a lower price. The most common way to purchase a stock are through brokers.

There are in person brokerage companies, such as Merrill Lynch, or you can go online and trade online yourself or through a broker. Online sites such as Scottrade, Etrade, etc let you trade stocks on a real time basis, and only cost a few dollars per trade. Many people may be enticed to buy penny stocks, but those are almost a sure bet to make you lose money.

Overall, there are some basics that were outlined that are important to trading stocks, but to really be successful, there is a bunch more to learn.

If you read the other posts that have been put up on this site, you should have a pretty good idea on how to buy and sell stocks and how to decide which stocks you want to put your money in.

How to make your nest egg even bigger is by staying on top of the news that is released on each of the companies that you’re in. Just because the company is doing good at the time that you purchased the shares doesn’t mean that it will stay that way.

Throughout the day, week, and month, every stock will rise and fall in value. Depending on what is going on in the stock markets themselves will effect your stock in one way or another. This is where your research will come in. If you see that your stock has lost 10% of it’s value in a day or so, your research will have told you if it’s because of the company or just a healthy pull-back. If it was a pull-back because of profit-takers or that the major indices brought it down, then you should go ahead and buy more shares at the lower price to take advantage of the situation.

If the price fell because the company came out with a bad earnings report or lowered it guidance for the future, well then you will have to decide to either sell or just hold o to the shares you have until there’s some sort of rally before getting out.

Like I said, stock trading is easy if you just do the research and stay on top of the news to keep yourself in the loop of things.

What is a penny stock? A penny stock is just like any other stock that you would buy in a company. The difference is the value of the shares in the company. Basically it’s a stock that is valued less than $1 per share (some would say less than $5).

When you look into penny stocks online, you mostly see these site that tell you that they made a 300% gain on a stock trade and typically that can happen when you deal with stock shares that are less than $1. If the price per share was $0.25 and it gained $0.15 in one day (which could happen a does), you would be up 60%. Quite often stocks that are valued in this price range will have those types of moves, but what often happens is that in just a few days of gaining anywhere from 60% to 150% it will drop back down to it’s original price before it made those gains.

Penny stocks are usually companies that are relatively new and are trying to raise capital to increase the size of their business. Since they are new it can fail in it’s attempts and close their doors forever. How do you know which companies to invest in when you want to but into these types of stocks?

Research is the key. Most times it’s hard to find any information out on these companies because they are new. Most of them don’t trade on the big boards (DOW, NASDAQ), so they don’t really file their financial reports on a regular basis. In some cases you will find that these companies don’t even operate in the United States, so they don’t follow the rules of the SEC (Security Exchange Commission).

What you can do at times (which is something that I do), is to call the company and talk to the highest executive that you can to get a feel for the condition of them. You will be amazed to see how much you can learn from the person with just a few phone calls. I do have to say that if you call, you must let then believe that you are a shareholder or they’ll think twice about really talking.

Be careful when dealing with penny stocks, you can get burned more times than hitting it big. Remember, it’s estimated that nine out of ten business’ fail.

I’ve lost money over the years and in the beginning in bothered me quite a bit. Whenever that happened, I’d look at what I did and looked to see where I went wrong. Sometimes it was my research wasn’t thorough enough, other times it might have been the way I bought into the company. There were also those times that I didn’t do anything wrong, but because of the condition of the stock market as a whole, I would be on the losing end. Either way, I learned something for the next trade. Education is the key to wise money investments especially when you’re a beginner.

In this post I want to talk to you about “core position”. A core position is the stocks that you originally buy at a particular price. I’ve mentioned before about buying your shares incrementally and not all at once. So the first batch that you purchased would be considered your core.

In this example I’ll talk about company “XYZ”, which has a a price per share at $50. For this example I will also state that the cash in my portfolio is valued $50,000.

I never put more than 15% of my portfolio in any one stock. With that in mind, it would mean that I won’t invest more than $7,500 in “XYZ”. That tells me that I can only purchase 150 shares of “XYZ”. My first purchase will be 50 share at the price of $2,500, while keeping the rest for later buy-ins. The stock drops $5 per share in the nest week. I will go ahead and buy another 25 shares of “XYZ”, which will cost me $1,125. Another week goes by and the stock has been going up and down between $45-$50. I will simply sit on the sidelines and wait before doing anything. If the stock takes a dive because the markets have dragged it down I’ll buy my next buy at $40, costing me another $1000.

I now own 100 shares of “XYZ” with my average cost basis being $46.25. I’ve only invested so far $4,625 into the “XYZ company. If I had bought all of the shares at once, it would have cost me $5,000 (saving me $375).

When the stock goes back up to $50, I’ll only sell 50 shares of the stock (the ones the I bought at $45 and below). I will make a profit of $375 for those shares that I sold. While at the same time I continue to hold on to the original 50 shares.

When the price drops back down to the $45 range I will again pick up another 25 shares and start the process all over.

It the price had gone up after buying the first 50 shares that would have been fine also. I would pick up another 25 shares at $55. Once it rose above the price I would either waited for the price to drop back at the $50 level or if it kept going, I would just ride out the gains as it went up in value.

Everybody wants to hit it big either by playing the lottery, go to Las Vegas or trading stocks, but the truth of the matter is that most people never do. The lottery and the roulette wheel is not the place to putting your hard earned money if you’re looking to make it grow. Let’s be for real, they call it gambling for a reason.

As for trading in the stock market can be a different story. Stock trading is not gambling and should never be treated as such. Like I said, you can make some great gains and double or triple your money, but don’t expect it to happen over night. No one ever becomes rich trading stocks, wealthy yes, rich no (unless you’re Warren Buffet). If a stock that you’re in doubles in value, you are only going to make twice the money you had. So, if you invested $2000 and it doubled, you would only have $4000 after all was said and done.

Don’t get me wrong, when I say that you can’t get rich, I don’t mean that you should even bother investing in the stock market. Quite the opposite, you should be investing in your future as well as teaching your kids to invest in theirs. The longer you’re invested in the stock market the wealthier (and eventually richer) you will become.

Patience is a virtue and to be involved in the stock market, you will need it. Don’t ever treat stock trading as a game because it’s not a game. I enjoy trading stocks and have a lot of fun doing it, even though you will hear some say differently.

Take your time, learn everything you can and be patient.