The actual nuts and bolts of how to invest in stock market is pretty easy. You open a brokerage account and you place an order with your broker to buy or sell some stocks.
The hard part is learning what stocks to buy and sell and when you should buy and sell. This part is considerably more difficult and if you want to do it right, you must be willing to invest more than money… you need to invest time.
Time to educate yourself and find a partner who you can work with. This is where so many people mess up. They think they can just hire a broker and jump right in.
Most people treat their investing more like gambling. The truly successful investors believe that gambling is what you do when you are on vacation, not how you treat your hard earned money.
So, the first step you should take if you want to learn how to invest in stock market is to find a place to get educated on investing.
You can read books, take home study courses, and even take courses at your local college (in many cases).
The point is that information on investing is not hard to find, what might be a little harder to find is good information.
Some of the most successful and wealthy investors ever do things their own way. Most of what they do will be totally different from what a lot of the advisers around today will tell you to do.
That is because many advisers actually have their own interests at heart. Many of the so called financial experts that people turn to to help them invest, are really only commissioned sales people.
While there is nothing wrong with being a commissioned sales person, it is important that you understand that going in.
If your adviser only makes money when they buy or sell stocks for you and their other clients, how can you be sure that their advice to buy or sell a certain stock is in your best interest or if it’s just a way for them to make more money?
Or, think of it like this; who would you rather take advise on investing from someone who doesn’t make enough money on their own investments to live on so they have to work for someone else and make commissions, or someone who lives on the money they make by investing their own money?
Kind of sounds like a no brainer to me. So, be very careful who you decide to work with when it comes time to make your investments. Not all advisers are created equal.
This is the biggest reason I can think of to take some time to educate yourself on at least some basics of investing first. If you know nothing about investing, you are basically at the mercy of whoever you hire to help you.
Your success, or lack thereof, will be totally tied to the knowledge and honesty of the person you hire to work with. If you don’t know anything about the process you can’t assess how good the information you are getting actually is.
Good luck with your investing, but remember, a successful investor knows that it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with knowledge of how to invest in stock market.