dunno nuttin bout nuttin

[knifeandfork]

never bought a share in my life what is the best way for me to do so in small amounts? btw what does shorting mean? laugh it up im really clueless but more interested in the process than anything else if i know the "how" i might try to figure out the what. thanks for your time to anyone willing to reply.
-j

[RayGarlington]

Just pretend every stock is carefully analyzed and fairly priced. There are no bargains.

Reduce business risk through diversity of your purchases.

this is easily accomplished using the various index funds and derivatives that are available. Use dollar cost averaging.

Don't pay an analyst or fund manager to guess for you. Your guess is as good as his.

Set this up so that it happens automatically so you don't have to think about it (unless you really like studying business and economics).

[GeorgeF]

You need to reduce expenses as much as possible:
1) Go to www.vanguard.com (http://www.vanguard.com) and invest in their funds. I believe they will give you some basic common sense advice.
http://flagship2.vanguard.com/web/planret/PlanningAdvicePublicOverview.html.

Vanguard is a mutual company and is owned by the people that invest in it's funds.

2) www.freetrade.com (http://www.freetrade.com) charges 0% commissions. They make their money selling 'order flow' which I do not understand but all brokers do it. Invest in ishares, which are mutual funds you buy like stocks and have very low expenses. http://www.ishares.com/. Try something like 50% stock funds - 50% bond funds.

3) I suggest you go to your library (also free ) and read 'A random walk down wall street'

4) I do not suggest you study the market as it is unlikely that you can justify the time you spend stock picking, which could be spent earning money, unless you have atleast $500,000.

5) Consider listening to www.bobbrinker.com (http://www.bobbrinker.com) for a few months. It might be worth subscribing to his newsletter.

[BadBoyBenny]

I agree with the other posters that you are better off buying an index than individual stocks unless you spend a lot of time learning before you ever make a purchase. That is hard to do if you come from a gambling background.

Shorting is borrowing shares of stock and selling them. You are betting that the stock will go down and you can buy it back for less money than you borrowed.

[knifeandfork]

thank you all:)