I apologize for I skimmed this thread. I recently started trading some stocks. I have had two 401k's for the better part of 15 years now, so I am kinda spending some play money buying individual stocks. What I have learned:
-Don't over play. Buy and ride it out. Everything I read says the average person is not capable of reading the market and moving a lot. Most people screw up by, purchasing and then selling too soon or too often. Ride out the market.
-You can't beat the market. You might get lucky once but you cannot consistently make the picks where you buy something very low and get lucky and it turns into the next Apple, IBM, etc.
-Diversify yourself. Don't invest everything into stock, bonds, market funds, real estate, Futures, commodities, currency, etc, all alone. Having a little of everything is best.
I use Options House, simply because they don't have minimums and have low trade rates. Remember you essentially have to pay the cost to trade twice. Once to buy the stock, another to sell it. That eats profit margins.
I typically buy stocks that are less than $10, simply because I don't have the capital to really get any return if I am buying expensive stocks. You need to be able to buy enough volume that if it does appreciate you can actually make something.
One I've been watching for a while and is going up and down is AKS, American Steel. They are still cheap and have potential to triple up maybe more. There is a big anti-trust lawsuite taking place with the US Government preventing mostly the Chinese in dumping cheap, low price steel into the US market. If this goes through that should really help them.
I'm very rookie when it comes to this. I have a small budget that I set aside for stocks each month, basically money that I blew on stupid ****. I still invest into a 401k. If you have a company match your are a straight idiot if you don't participate in that. It's "FREE" money.
