Hi,

This may be a long post, as it's my first, but I hope to be here for many years to come

I have quite a few questions, and I'm hoping some nice people would be willing to help answer

To give some basic background, I have a degree in statistics, but I haven't done too much with finance. I'm confident in my ability to learn the math behind stocks, but I know it will take awhile. Before posting here, I actually read all the tutorials and intros on a simulation website (am I allowed to say the name? It has the same ending as Wikipedia but it's about Investing ...)

I made a portfolio there with $10,000 starting money, and the account value is up to $10,400 after a month (I literally did nothing but buy Apple, Ebay, Target, Amazon, Walmart).

After reading some basics, can I confirm I understand all the following about these companies?

- They are large cap and represent the least risk to invest in
- They are 'solid' investments as in the odds of me losing all my money from them going bankrupt is slim to none, and they will continue to grow over time as there's no reason to assume people will stop wanting iPhones, 2 day home delivery, to be able to sell their items around the world, etc.
- They will not show large returns as they can't grow 10, 15, 20% a year when their cap is already so large
- They are long investments and ideal for somebody with the mentality of 'I just want to put $5,000 away and get $10,000 back in 10 years without ever doing anything with the stock market again'
- If I wanted to invest in a dividend stock, these are good as the actual dollar value (Amazon is $330 a share, seriously?) is high, so if the dividend is 2% I would get $6.60 per Amazon share, per divident yield? This one I'm pretty certain I'm incorrect on

Given my background, is technical analysis probably my best bet as I can work with charts and trends and historical data to help predict the future?

Is there a good Excel spreadsheet that can import stock data and will then show statistics and parameters for analysis to be able to pick a stock? I've been unable to locate one through about 20 minutes of google searches

Where should somebody like me go to be able to purchase stocks? Etrade? Sharebuilder?

And the final question (for now), how exactly do you FIND a stock you don't know about? Let's say there's a stock out there with an intrinsic value of $30 a share and it's trading for $10, how would I know about it?

Thanks, appreciate all the responses