Unlike others, I won’t preach to you about how and why you should do such & such with your money. It’s your call and I respect that.

Instead, I’ll suggest you hold off investing until a few months from now when there will be more stability, hopefully. We are in the midst of a correction and it’s not likely to resolve until April or May. So far, over the past three weeks, the market has given up 10%. I expect it to give up another 10 to 20% over the next month or so. Your $10,000 could wind up diminished significantly, worth only $8,000.

I do some day trades. I never day trade a stock costing more than $25 because I’ll never make enough to be worth it. Today, for example, I picked up 2,000 shares of JADA, a Chinese jade manufacturing company serving the Chinese Mainland. I paid 33.5 cents per share, just now I see it closed at 38 cents. I’m ahead $90. It normally trades much higher than this so I intend to hold on for the time being. If it should drop back to 33 cents, I’ll add another 2,000 shares, knowing it will have the same opportunity to rise to 38 cents it exhibited today. That means things are stacked in my favor. It also means I could wind up $180 ahead based on 4,000 shares moving from 33 cents to 38 cents. And with 33 cents representing the bottom, my odds are good that it will rise above 38 cents, thus bringing me a strong potential for several hundred $ in profit.

A few hundred $ means nothing to me—but with 27 stocks in my portfolios, I look to make a few thousand $ in a week. Today I pulled ahead just short of $3,000—$2,800-something. If each week I can pull ahead that much, and I usually do…then I’ll come out ahead $150K/yr. I’m happy with that because it’s more than I need and I love this work.

Go to: http://www.investorvillage.com and in the search box, type: JADA. Look at CNOA, CKGT, BSPM, LTUS—these are companies sometimes incorporated in the US but all do business primarily in the People’s Republic of China. China is the primary economic driver today and I’m heavily invested there and doing well. You could look at thousands of companies, of course…but looking into these will lead you to others and that will gve you a broader base from which to look at things.

1) Don’t use any credit or margin when you are investing unless you know what you are doing, like professionally.

2) Don’t buy individual stocks. The market is pretty efficient, especially for Large Cap stocks like Microsoft and Apple. You need a diversified portfolio so try buying into index funds like ETFs. This will be significantly safer than stock picking.

3) Unless you just want to own stock in a company for fun, treat it like going to Vegas. Be ready to lose it all. As a single investor, you will never be as good as the thousands of managers with teams of analyst working full time to evaluate prices; so just long a diversified portfolio. Day trading is a losers game statistically.

For a first time investor, on the day trading scene ,m I would recommend a free site no fees no subscription and a great chat forum with experienced traders their to help out.

I think you are jumping into this a little too soon. The biggest problem people investing the stock market have is that they do it without educating themselves first and therefore end up gambling all their money away.

I really recommend using the techniques taught by System Pro Trading, which is a stock market course created by an experienced and very profitable trader that offers you over 24 hours of video training tutorials. It goes over a lot of secret techniques that the professionals use, so the information you get here is literally priceless.

I just started going through it and I’m really impressed and practically blown away by what I can learn with this.

http://www.systemprotrading.com