Watch an Investment

You have to have a bit of money to make money, I'm afraid. But supposing that you have it and want to invest it, you need to open an account with somebody. I chose Scottrade.

Unfortunately, I can't exactly show you how to open an account with Scottrade. But supposing you've got one and wish to learn how to trade on it, or just witness someone trade on it before you open an account yourself, please watch.

Obviously you need to log into your account so that Scottrade knows whose money they're moving around. The image below is of my account main page, minus the personal stuff like exact value or how much I've got where. I explain a lot of shit, so if you're here just for the images, go to the bottom.

So you can see quite literally what my homepage when I log in. I've edited out how much money is in my portfolio and my contact information and a few other details.

Note the tabs at the top. They will help you choose what type of business you intend to take care of. If you just want to look, Home is a great place to be. If you want to execute a trade, click on that tab. If you want to look at your account with scottrade, click on that tab.

Every page has a spot where you can enter a ticker symbol for a quick check. A ticker symbol is pretty much what a company is known as to stock investors - a second name used for trading you could say. For example, Apple is traded on the market as AAPL. Ford is traded as F. Usually the ticker symbol uses a lot of the same symbols that are pulled from the regular name. A water company might use H2O as their ticker or something like that. It's almost always three or four letters, sometimes one or two, hardly ever five.

You can see a chart on my homepage. That is my current investment movement over the last seven days. You can reload it to show a month or three or however long you want. You can see that it's been a rough week for me. A key to investing is to not loose optimism during your down times. Have faith, Grasshopper.

Settled Funds is the money that you have completely in your name. Other funds might be in the process of moving around so they're not settled yet. If you sell investments, it takes three days to settle. Unsettled funds can be used for buying stock, but if you sell again before three days is up, that's a free ride and that's illegal. Don't rush things. My biggest mindset mistake was to be too anxious, so anxious that I always wanted my money invested - I should have waited for the right moment as opposed to jumping the gun.

Total money value is the amount of dollars Ihave to move around. Total account value is the dollars and the investments added together.

The box below that information shows my investments. Yesterday morning AAPL was down there as well but I sold as expected (I sold at the exact highest point in the day - a rare event). Anyway, you can see I am invested in a company known by the ticker HL. Hecla Mining Co. To me it looks like the value of this company cycles in a rather rhythmic fashion and falls for no apparent reason, I suspect it fell with high probability of rising again. I watched the indicators and decided to invest about thirteen days ago. It wasn't done falling yet, hense my portfolio didn't do that well. But you can also see it's bouncing back and for the last two days my portfolio has been doing alright. You win some, you lose some.

The box labeled "today's completed orders" is usually empty for me. Most people who are really involved in their investments trade once a week at most (penny stocks and day traders, and people who have really highly diversified portfolios might trade more often - usually people who really know what they're doing or really don't know what they're doing.). Today I sold apple, so AAPL is in that box. It tells you what ticker you sold (or bought), how many shares and at what price, then totals it up for you on the right.

I like to trade using what is called limit buying and limit selling - pretty much you tell a computer to handle your money and to make your move for you when the market reaches a certain point. When the computer is watching the market and your money hasn't been invested by the computer yet, that is an open order and is listed in the open order box. I told the computer I wanted to sell my HL stocks at $11.24. So now the computer is waiting patiently until the price rises to 11.24 and then will make the trade for me (Pre-set to be 10% what I initially put in). I also wanted to buy some Countrywide Financial stock, or CFC. I can't tell what is about to happen with CFC so I didn't want to just buy it at current value. I want to buy it if a great deal shows up or I can determine if it's about to rise. If I can buy it at $4.50, that's a great deal. So I set the computer to buy CFC at 4.5 if the market suddenly moves that low (every once in a while a person with a lot of shares will sell them all at market value and the price will shoot down incredibly fast and then shoot back up - incredibly rare but it happens.) Now I don't think CFC will drop that low, but it doesn't hurt to have my money waiting to snag the opportunity if it arrises. If CFC rises without dropping to pick up my money at 4.50 first, I have lost no money. Having that open order does not hurt me in any way. It might hold me back from investing in something more lucrative, in which case I just cancel the order and trade the other stock.

The watch list is a group of companies I want to have my eyes on whenever I enter my account. It gives the ticker symbol, the value per share, and the value change since the stock opened that day.

Anyway, now I will show you how to make a trade. It might be a little tough to comprehend, but you want to click on the Trade tab.

You tell Scottrade if you intend to buy or sell stock. Do so by clicking the drop-down in the buy/sell field.

Tell Scottrade how many shares you want to buy or sell. Let's pretend we're buying. It's much more fun.

Tell Scottrade what ticker you intend to buy.

Now order type is a bit tricky. I always choose limit from the drop-down menu so that I can choose the price the trade will take place at if it does take place. The default is market price, which means you buy that number of shares from the cheapest seller at that point in time.

Then it asks how long the order should stand. If it's market value it will take place either when the order is put through or when the market opens again the next day. If it's a limit value, you can set a duration for the order to stay open before the computer automatically cancels the order. I always leave mine on indefinitely and keep an eye on it to make sure the order isn't going to eventually screw me over. Some people don't want to keep that close an eye on it and set it to cancel after just a day if it hasn't gone through yet. It's all just a matter of preference. Watch me fill this out.

Click on Review Order once the page is all filled out. The all or nothing box is not critical. It just means if you want 100 shares and a buyer might be selling only 25, you can choose whether or not to take a portion of what you want or wait until you can buy all 100 at once.

Click "Place Order" and you're done! It will then show you a confirmation screen similar to the one you see below. Move on to where you heart desires after that.