Investing in Shares

First you should look into getting a broker. Find one which suits your investment needs. The main things to look for are obviously low brokerage commissions, but also take time to evaluate how easy their interface is to trade with as it only takes one trade to be entered wrongly through a non easy to use interface to make up for however cheap the commissions may be. Check out the list on www.sharedigest.com for some high quality online brokers. Also it depends what markets you are going to trade as to what broker will suit you best. Some brokers will offer the ability to trade multiple markets from one platform, others will require you to be a resident of the country where the broker is based. To invest in mutual funds is similar, many brokers will offer this service to you so have a look and shop around. Don't be afraid to sign up to a number of brokers to get the best of what each is offering. Often you will find that one broker might have an excellent trading platform for trading complex options strategies but their commissions on straight stock trades are too high and vice versa. Also you may be able to sign up to a broker that offers good quality free research tools but charges high commissions and just use them as a research tool and place your trades with a lower commission broker. The choice is yours, but you will find that once you pick a broker that suits you best, then the commissions will really pale into insignificance.

Hi, I 'invest' typically with a long term view, but I also 'trade' on the short term, but this is purely in options as they are more flexible and allow me to trade with much smaller amounts of money yet still have the ability to realise substantial returns. For my longer term investments I tend to stick with Australian equities (I live in Australia) as I get more regular exposure to their news from day to day sources. As far as which stocks to invest in, well thats the million dollar question of course. But I tend to evaluate them based on the type of business they conduct and their history of earnings and share price growth. Then I will look for opportunities to buy good quality stocks that are undervalued. Most recently I have invested in the major telecommunications firm 'Telstra' over here in Oz, which has been dramatically out of favour for several years now with share prices dropping from the $7 mark a few years ago to lows of about $3.50 mid 2006 - all this during an extreme bull market overall. The company has suffered some setbacks yet still maintains solid per share earnings and pays a consistent and high yielding dividend. I bought in on the recent release of shares from the government holdings known as "T3" which were offered on an installment basis with an initial payment of $2.00 per share and the balance of $1.60 not due til May 2008. Since I acquired these shares in November 2006 they have risen dramatically from $2.00 to highs recently of around $2.73 - approximately a 36% rise in just several months. Plus they are to pay a dividend of 28cents per share this year which would take the total return to around 50% assuming the share price does not rise or fall further. However before buying in I had watched telstra with close interest for around 2 years - believing it was undervalued and waiting patiently for the share price to bottom and present a buy opportunity. However this long term approach does require a lot of patience, a lot of time and when you get an opportunity it also requires quite a lot of capital to make it worthwhile. For this reason I like to also keep myself busy with short term options trading, which is a whole different ball game. For more info on both methods see: www.sharedigest.com