If someone were to ask what I thought was the best method to make money in the stock market, investing or trading, it would not be an easy question to answer. Both investing and trading offers their pros and cons. I personally wouldn’t consider myself an investor or a trader. My own method to achieving portfolio growth is mainly short term investing along with some long term investments and and even smaller amount of trading.

E-Trade is arguably the most popular and well known online discount stock brokerages. Boasting over 4000 employees and having a net income over 600 million dollars per year (2006), E-Trade clearly is sitting high on the list of top online brokerages. I personally use E-Trade for all of my investment needs and do recommend it to anyone who is considering opening an account with an online stock broker. Here is how it E-Trade ranks among their competition:

Have you ever played a game of poker with just chips and no money on the line? In those games players bluff, they call hands they know they have no chance at winning, and will ultimately play in a manner that displays one huge underlining problem: they don’t care because it’s not real money. Well, that’s paper trading in a nut shell.

Every day the stock market tempts me to be a gambler and not an investor. Each day that I become a better investor, I am tempted to throw it all away for some risky trade. Becoming successful in the Stock Market is never something that is easily accomplished, and one of the main reasons is because it is just too easy to get caught up in the quest for fast and easy money. You make a few good investments, and just like that you feel like you are ready to take on some of the more riskier positions. The irony of it is that you built up most of your gains and confidence through conservative investments. So why would it make sense to go against what is working for you?

Every investor needs a self created list of rules to invest by so that they stay disciplined and successful. Many investors learn the hard way what the do’s and don’t’s of the stock market are, but fail to write them down so that they don’t repeat these mistakes over the course of their investing career. You need to make a list of rules to invest by yourself, and this article will show you how to do that.

Investing is all about managing risk, reward, and choosing the best locations to grow your money. Sometimes in the path towards successful investing you encounter a few speed bumps that hinder your performance. Other times, you run into a hurdle that knocks you flat on your ass. Significant losses to your portfolio are something every investor experiences atleast once, but not every investor recovers from. If you plan to be a successful investor, you need to learn to cope with these losses so that you can be able to recover and revive your underperforming portfolio. Here are ways you can cope with significant money losses in your portfolio:

I just watched the movie “The Secret”, and my oh my was I disappointed in both the creators and the supporters of this movie. The movie basically takes the simple concept of “stay positive, be passionate about what you desire, and apply yourself to find ways to achieve your desires” and drags it out into a ridiculously long movie that claims all you need to do is wish for something and it will come true. No further detail went into explaining how this miraculous event occurs, instead they just gave ludicrous examples of “the secret” in action.

Emotions are the handicap of the novice investor. They hinder your rational thought process and increase your chance of failure. So it should be obvious that you’ll need to ignore your emotions if you ever want to make a profit while investing. Here are some quick ways you can become as cold as ice and invest emotion-free.

Every investor has their own strategies, methods, and techniques to achieving success. Though despite these differences, all successful investors share the same distinct traits which truly separate them from the herd. The five traits of a successful investor are:

The Stock Market is a significant entity of our society that seems to have too much ignorance surrounding it by the non-investing individuals. The intention of this mini-series entitled “Introduction to the Stock Market” is to enlighten the average individual with no background or knowledge in the investing world.