Share Trading

Before beginning on your trading journey, you must first learn some share trading basics. You can start trading on the Australian sharemarket for as little as $500 plus brokerage costs, but most people start with $2000 minimum. Share trading involves the buying and selling or selling and buying of a stock – capital growth or capital decline for profit. Before you even starting buying and selling stocks like a mad man you must first ask yourself the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve from your share trading?

Is share trading a gambling activity? The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines gambling as to 'play games of chance for money'. It also defines gambling as to 'risk much in the hope of great gain'. Now, old George doesn't think share trading is gambling. In that post, he says, "You used technical indicators to tell you that the balance of probability lies in your court and if it doesn't - well you must quickly initiate risk management and cut losses." A statement that contradicts our dictionary definition. So some people classify share trading as "glorified gambling." Well, if you stick to the genuine definition of gambling, share trading IS gambling. Personally, I was in denial with this for a long time. Every time someone brought up share trading and gambling I would refuse to believe it was. But surely there's more to this argument...?

What is share trading? Of course you may say - the answer is simple: "Share trading is the activity of actively trading shares in the view of making a profit". Simple wasn't it? Well, case closed, we can all go home now. Well, I want to probe into what share trading really is in reality, not some non-sensical theory that seems impractical in the real world. Sure, the laws of supply and demand rule the markets, but what I want to discuss is what share trading means to the retail trader: traders like you and me.

For anyone who has started their own home business or made a career for themself at home. I am interested in starting a business or finding something that I can do from my home, possible using the computer. I have not come up with an idea yet. But I'd like to hear from anyone who has done something like this and hear what you think about working from home. Are you/have you been successful? I am NOT out to "steal" anyones business idea, so you don't have to share exactly what you do, if you do not want to. Just curious if I should do it or not.

I am a 17 year old teenager and i want some tips on how to get started in playing the stock market?

You are young - so I guess you have a riskier trading profile than older people. You have the time to earn back money you lose - so perhaps most of your "playing" would be high risk high return ventures / trading. Have a look at CFDs (http://www.mysharetrading.com/trading-topics/derivatives-cfds) and other derivatives for a little leverage.

How do I figure out how many shares of a stock can I buy for any given amount, without actually buying them?

The answer is by using simple mathematics.

First you need to decide how much of each stock you are going to buy - since not all stocks are priced equally some would be $20, other $400 and some 0.05 cents.

$100,000 over ten stocks... Decide what ratio you will hold of each stock. E.g. 6:3:4:1:9:4:3:7:9:2

So totalling the ratio is 48. Now you can use a combination of the ratios and fractions to find out how much stock you can hold with your $100,000.

When trading stocks on NYSE I find stocks with ask/buy prices marked N/A. How do I acquire these stocks?

When I am trading stocks on yahoo finance I come across stocks like AK Steel that have a bid price marked N/A and an Ask price marked N/A. How do I purchase shares of these stocks?

1. Trading Halt.
2. No liquidity. there are currently no bids on the market to buy or offers to sell their stock.

If it is a trading halt - you can't buy them until the halt has been lifted.
If it has no liquidity, simply put up a bid price at which you are comfortable to buy them at.