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?