I'm just a beginner as well but so far this is my personal take on getting started. Stay away from penny stocks. A lot of people have the attitude that they only have a little money so they need to throw it on something cheap and hope for huge gains to try and get ahead. But seriously you have better odds at many of the table games in Vegas. There are probably some viable strategies for a mini account of 500$ but you will be pretty limited. Don't be disappointed if all you get are some good lessons. Buying stocks is capital intensive therefore hard to spread around your risk much. It will be easy to get taken out on one or two bad plays. If it were me I would keep saving until I had 2500$ so I could open a margin account. This would allow for options trading which allows you to take smaller positions thereby making it possible to spread your risk around. Then I would learn how to reduce my cost basis by selling positions against each other in vertical spreads while defining my risk. With about 3000$ in capital I currently have over 25 positions in good liquid stocks. Everything from UNG to FB, DIS, YHOO, AAPL etc. Tons of information on utube for option spread trading. Good Luck and Welcome