It is pretty easy to start investing in the stock market. Now more than ever it is easy because you can just trade right over the internet. There are many online brokerage firms out there that charge low fees and are very easy. You just place an order and save on commission fees.
I personally use Sharebuilder as my online brokerage firm and I love it. I have been with them for more than 2 years and I have been very pleased the whole time. They only charge $4 per automatic trade and $9.95 for market orders, which is a real bargain. There are no limits to the amount of stock you can buy at a time.
Instead of putting in how many stocks you want, you can put in the amount of money worth of stock you want. For example, you can say you want $200 worth of a stock priced at $43.54. You would get approximately 4.5934 stocks.
For an automatic trade that is placed every third Tuesday of the month, it’s only $4. You can set it up one time or every month. If you bought $100 of Google, you pay $4 or if you bout $1,000 of Google, you pay $1,000.
This only goes for individual companies. If you buy stock in 5 different companies, you will pay the $4 commission for for each company, so you would pay a total fee of $20 no matter how much of each stock you bought.
A lot of other online investment firms and other brokerage firms require a minimum deposit in your investment account, usually $1,000 or more. You can start with just $10 with Sharebuilder if you really want to. It’s up to you how much you want to invest, but remember the lesser you invest, the higher your commission cost is.
If you aren’t interested in choosing your own stocks, Sharebuilder also allows you to invest in mutual funds. This way, the fund manager does all the stock choosing and you still earn money from it.
Signing up for Sharebuilder couldn’t be simpler. When you sign up you just fill out some forms and might have to send in some copies of ID for verification, which is for your safety, and they you are all set to trade.
