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.

 

http://www.investorwords.com/

start with A...

 

Do NOT Day Trade!! Think Long-Term, it'll always pay off

 

Thanx alot for the info guys. I no nothing about it, so im prolly just gonna start reading the wall street journal and reading books. It was just a thought of something im interested in getting into later on in life.

 

good! and DVPGSR was right the way to start(i thought you knew this already) would be to learn accounting pratices read and understand finantial statements.... so buye a intro to accounting book! you can find them for cheap at used book stores.

 

It can be very lucrative if you do it right. I made one solid investment and cashed out at the right time and have been enjoying it for the last couple years.

I wouldn't suggest getting stock tips off a message board though. Do your own research and investigate the companies you are interested in. A five year history is a good start along with any court related incidences, ongoing investigations, environmental issues, and general market value of the actual product produced all influence whether it is a good investment or not.

 

Im actually gonna start using DVPGSR method cus that some smart thinking.

 

so, howve you done so far

 

I've been actually reading some books and actually today i was looking at some stocks that im gonna invest my imaginary money in. But i wanna still do some more research.

 

what books? what stocks? what research?