These days the très cool thing to do (next to going Green) is to play the stock market, or to at least be able to pretend that you do. It’s a lot easier for the average Joe to do, with companies like E*Trade and Scottrade and Ameritrade vying for customers. The trouble for me, as an “investor,” is that I don’t know anything about the stock market.

Since I’m not a broker (or anything remotely resembling one), I tend to follow the free advice of experts like Pete Najarian, Jeff Macke, Karen Finerman and Jim Cramer. I have good reason to listen to what they have to say – they make a lot of money and their predictions are often pretty dead-on.

Unfortunately, I really don’t have a lot of time to spend watching financial TV shows like Fast Money and Mad Money. Well, ok, I might have time, but honestly there are other things I’d rather do with that time, like read a book or play video games or watch grass grow.

The fact that both Fast Money and Mad Money have recaps online might also be a reason I don’t watch the shows live; most of the time I just check out the recaps to get their stock picks. The benefits of checking their picks online are that I can get the info on my own time, I don’t have to worry about missing something someone said, and it’s all written out for me to reference later if I need to.

Is that cheating? I don’t think so. Just my opinion.

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Frankly, though, people who talk about stocks use a lot of words and phrases that I've never heard before. It's really annoying. Even reading the recaps can be frustrating (What the heck are "puts" and why am I being told to buy them?). Fortunately, it didn't take long for me to discover helpful stuff like Investopedia and InvestorWords. They're pretty much dictionaries for stock broker lingo, and they've been lifesavers. I've also found Yahoo! Finance to be pretty useful when I need to look up some information on a company.

These are by far not the only tools you can use to find out more about stocks, but if you're like me and you just want to see which picks the experts are recommending, these few resources can really help. Happy investing!

(Photo by stopnlook, used under Creative Commons license)