Choosing Your First Stocks: An Introduction

To successfully make more money than you lose in the stock market, you need to learn a number of important skills. Those include talents like being able to read the tiniest changes in the market or economy when you’re trading, or knowing when to sell, even when everyone else is buying. However, before you can begin to hone those particular skills, there’s one thing that you need to learn how to do before anything else, and that’s picking your shares.

Knowing which stocks to watch and which you should ignore when you’re building out your portfolio is easier said than done. Everyone has their own distinct strategy to consider, from the people who want to explore styles like swing trading to those who are interested in long-term investment. Here’s a good insight into how you can get started.

Selecting Based on Risk and Personality

As you develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the environment that you’re trading in, your ability to pinpoint the perfect investments will continue to grow. However, until then, it’s best to keep your strategy for selecting purchases as simple as possible. For instance, start by figuring out what degree of risk you can live with when you’re spending your money. You should never spend more money than you can afford to lose. After all, while you can make a lot of money from these investments, you can lose it just as easily too.

Knowing your risk level won’t just tell you how much you can afford to spend on a specific set of shares, it will also give you an insight into what you should be looking at when you examine your securities. For instance, how volatile is the stock, and how easy is it going to be for you to sell it if the price begins to move in the wrong direction? You might also find that it’s easier to make choices based on your personality. For instance, if you’re a young person with a live-fast philosophy, then you might prefer short-term and more aggressive scalping methods. On the other hand, if you’re a little older and you’re planning for retirement, you may need to take a calmer, more careful approach.

Getting Started in the Market

While it’s often tempting to take the advice to just start trading when you want to begin making money as quickly as possible, but this strategy can actually cause you to lose a lot more money. The truth is that the market is a very volatile place, and you need to take the time to analyze and calculate your opportunities carefully. Making informed and educated decisions will prevent you from doing anything that could be dangerous to your wealth in the long-term.

Remember, you don’t necessarily need to spend any actual money to begin with. You can begin testing your strategies by using a paper trading or demo account here TradingSim. This way, you can put different ideas to the test, and see how well your tolerance for risk really holds up when you’re in a trading situation.