What is the cheapest way to start investing an a s&p mutual fund?
futures trading education said:
I am a college student who wants to start investing but can’t invest the minimum 500 that a lot of places want. I’d like to just invest a hundred or so to get started.
I am a college student who wants to start investing but can’t invest the minimum 500 that a lot of places want. I’d like to just invest a hundred or so to get started.
Scottrade has no minimum for individual accounts.
Try an index ETF. A good one is SPY.
There are others broken down by sector, industry, sub-industry, commodities, bonds, shorts, ect.. as you get better at it.
futures trading rooms
Do invest yet. Learn first.
An introductory book like _Stock Markets for Dummies_ is a good place to start. This will give you a basic explanation of most things there are to know about the mechanics of stock investing including useful websites to surf.
Investors Business Daily (IBD) is a solid daily resource (and its complement, ). It’s a better newspaper than the Wall Street Journal and it is built around a particular approach to trading. You could read _How to Make Money in Stocks_ by William O’Neil too–he’s the founder of IBD.
Search your local library for other books on stock investing. Try to absorb as much knowledge and understanding as you can.
After you have extensively researched and gained a solid foundation/education then look to open a brokerage account and paper trade–this is trading with play money before you put real capital at risk. You should do extensively before you eventually place your first trade live. Your early live trades should be with a very small position size. Only increase position size when you have done well to limit losses when the market has turned against you.
futures and options trading
Not much….try Sharebuilders. buy allot or buy a little, its for the small investor.
I think your only bet is Sharebuilder. If I were you I would save up for a little longer. $100 is really not worth the effort. $500 is just about the very minimum that makes sense these days. My favorite is RSP. It is an equal weight s&p 500 index fund. That means that your money is invested equally in all 500 stocks and not invested by market capitalization. God I hate market capitalization as a way of investing. I might add that it has handily outperformed the market weighted index funds.
Only ETF is cheapest way to invest
futures forex trading
Unfortunately, there is really no practical way to invest in the stock market with $100. The main reason is that you will pay, at a minimum, a $4 commission on any stock purchase you make. This is already puts you in a 4% hole and will require that you make a 4.1% return on your investment to just break even. This may not sound big, but it is.
What you should probably do instead is invest your money in a money market account until you have enough to invest in, say, Vanguard’s Star fund (linked below) for $1k. Vanguard does not charge you any commissions, so you won’t automatically start off in the hole big time.
-David