Scared of Wall Street? This Guide To Investing Can Help

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Written by Mark Kaelin

With a little know-how, you can get your feet wet in the stock market. Here’s Mark Kaelin’s five pronged guide to investing. It’s the, um, money.

aNewDomainmark-kaelin-mark-w-kaelin-anewdomain — According to studies like this one from CNN Money, a lot of us are overly wary of investing in the stock market. That’s understandable. Think of how hard the Great Recession of 2008 shook everyone’s confidence in the stock market and general investing altogether.

Yet many of the surveys I’ve seen also reveal that too many Americans under 40 don’t really understand the basics of how the stock market works.

You can’t deal with something you don’t understand. So I put together five sources of information to help you get your feet wet on Wall Street and elsewhere. Think of it as your very first guide to investing. Let’s go.

investing water can

Investing: Five Info Sources To Get Started

Here are five solid sources of information on investing in the stock market. Keeping up to date with these sources can answers those nagging questions many of you probably have about investing and potentially provide you with enough confidence to make that initial leap into the market.

  1. Mad Money with Jim Cramer: Watch this show nightly on CNBC for a couple of months and you’ll begin to understand how the stock market thinks.
  2. Yahoo Finance: Get in-depth information about the financial markets for free. This site is also a great place to learn how to track the stocks of companies for everything from earnings per share to dividend yield.
  3. The Motley Fool: This website is dedicated to investment education and understands that newcomers to investing often need education. You can actually learn how to invest with this tool, and I highly recommend it, especially if you have the desire to jump in.
  4. Investopedia: Learning the jargon surrounding investing can be a major hurdle for novices, but this website can go a long way to solving that problem.
  5. Better Investing: This website is an acknowledgement by the financial industry that potential investors need a bit of help navigating investment gobbledygook. The Education tab is especially helpful for novices.

Getting Wealthy (The Smart Way)

I wrote a series of educational articles on financial planning for BreakingModern that explain how thoughtful investing can change your life. The younger a person decides to take charge of their financial future the greater the impact.

You know, with a little effort and some applied know-how, financial independence is not only possible, it is practically inevitable.

For aNewDomain, I’m .

Featured image: Wall St. Sign via Wikimedia Commons

Body image: Personal Finance by Alan Cleaver via Flickr