I had to do this in college for one of my finance classes and it was a very good exercise.

Start off with an imaginary $1,000 and buy stocks and bonds and t-bills with it until the whole grand is gone. Then track your pics in an Excel spreadsheet either daily or weekly to see how you are doing. Did you make money or lose money? What did you learn by doing this?

The joy of doing something like this is that if you lose you are only losing something imaginary. It allows you to learn more and more about the markets and what your stocks are doing. Also good investors do not just "pick" stocks. A lot more goes into it than picking up the Wall Street Journal and saying "this looks nice"! I would reccomend getting familiar with the accounting methods used by coporations and learning how to read corporate balance sheets. You can order investor packets from companies Websites for free to learn more about the companies whose stocks you are interested in purchasing.

One thing though...DIVERSIFY!!! You don't want to get stuck with the next Enron or Global Crossing, although with Sarbanes-Oxley it will be pretty tough for a company to do that.