Beginner Looking for Guidance

Hello, Everyone!

Hope you all are having a great night. I am writing this message because I am looking to get involved with investing and the stock market but have no idea where to begin. I work in the broadcasting industry and did not grow up with much of a business or wealthy background.

A little about myself. I have faced a tremendous amount of adversity throughout my life however I used the tragedy in a positive way to succeed in my career and life. I am self-motivated and ambitious.

When I commit to something, I don't stop until I get results.

I would tremendously appreciate any proper guidance and more information on the basics of investing and the stock market.

My email is broadcastingbrian@gmail.com and you can find me on twitter @BroadcastingBri

I look forward to chatting more with everybody in the near future and wish nothing but the best to you and all your families.

Where are from Brian?

I'm by no means an expert, in fact I'm young and quite inexperienced. This just means that I know where you're coming from.

I was totally lost when I began looking into trading, but just found out that diving into any information I could find and doing some very small scale trading was helpful.

Read 'The Intelligent Investor' by Benjamin Graham (I found it to be a good starting point), as well as any other book you can get your hands on.

What I've discovered is that, at least in the beginning with trading, the easiest concept to grab onto is 'what companies do you believe in?'. Find a company that you feel do a lot of really good business and then do as much research as you can into whether they're a good company to buy shares in.

Don't try and 'beat the market' and find that mysterious company that everyone is telling you to pin your money onto - stick to what you know and do your research.

Then buy $100 worth of stocks in a company you feel confident about - tell yourself that you're ok with potentially loosing all of that money. See how it feels to monitor your portfolio. Did it go up, did it go down? Why?

im not an expert, but i predict stocks pretty well, use your intuition, to me it seems that the markets do the opposite of what you want them to do, they go up when you want them to go down, and they go down when you want them to go up. It's like whack a mole except you never know where the next mole is going to pop up. Use logic, but feel out the trade, you'll do alot better

There are 2 main schools of thought are Fundamental Analysis and Technical Analysis. Usually people will fall into one or the other and become knowledgeable within that category. As a start, maybe you can figure out which of the two makes sense to you.

Fundamental analysis is valuation of a company usually by cash flow and earnings. If you can value a company as a whole, you can estimate the price its stock should be based on how many shares of the stock exist. Then the idea is to invest in stocks that are undervalued.

Technical analysis is the use of charting patterns with the assumption that movement in the market happens in some sort of cyclical nature. Certain formations on the stock chart may produce a high likelihood of some future movement. For example, some people say a "head and shoulders" pattern indicates a reversal of direction.

Over years of trading, I've found that there's so many different ways that people are making money (and even more ways that people are losing money). There is no single best way. Find something that works for you, become an expert, and exploit it!