So You Want to Start Investing?

So you wanna invest? My suggestion to you if you would like to get in the “stock game” and start investing money is to first figure out how much and how often you would like to invest. I highly recommend investing monthly to balance out the highs and lows of the market. If this is a one-time thing, then you can disregard the following information. To support systematic investing,  I highly suggest taking a portion of your work checks, allowance, birthday money, or, however you get money and using it towards investing. Figuring which stocks to invest in is the next step. You may be tempted to put your money in big companies like Amazon, Apple, etc. and though this isn’t a bad idea to start, I think the best place to start is an index fund. An index fund is a collection of stocks. There are index funds for different categories, that base their chosen stocks on technology or medical, etc. Since these funds invest in multiple stocks (for example, VOO invests in 500 stocks), they are less risky (or what the finance geeks call “well-diversified”) Typically speaking, broader index funds increase gradually over time as they tend to mimic the overall economic growth. With that being said, when the economy is going through a recession, these index funds also reflect that. But, I think this a great thing to first buy because choosing one stock is tricky and more complicated, so why not buy one that includes a lot more for the price of one! This was the first thing I invested in and it has done me well, and this is my strong suggestion for someone’s first date with the stock market! You cannot trade as a minor, so I let my dad make the purchases at Robinhood, a user-friendly and informative site.