steps to start trading?

1. Open a brokerage account

Stock trading requires funding a brokerage account — a specific type of account designed to hold investments. If you don't already have an account, you can open one with an online broker in a few minutes. But don’t worry, opening an account doesn’t mean you’re investing your money quite yet. It just gives you the option to do so once you’re ready.

 

2. Set a stock trading budget

Even if you find a talent for trading stocks, allocating more than 10% of your portfolio to individual stocks can expose your savings to too much volatility. But this isn’t the only rule to manage risk. Other do's and don’ts include:

Invest only the amount of money you can afford to lose.

Don’t use money that’s earmarked for near-term, must-pay expenses like a down payment or tuition.

Ratchet down that 10% if you don’t yet have a healthy emergency fund and 10% to 15% of your income funneled into a retirement savings account.

3. Learn to use market orders and limit orders

Once you have your brokerage account and budget in place, you can use your online broker's website or trading platform to place your stock trades. You'll be presented with several options for order types, which dictate how your trade goes through. We go through these in detail in our guide for how to buy stocks, but these are the two most common types:

Market order: Buys or sells the stock ASAP at the best available price.
Limit order: Buys or sells the stock only at or better than a specific price you set. For a buy order, the limit price will be the most you're willing to pay and the order will go through only if the stock's price falls to or below that amount.

 4. Practice with a virtual trading account

There’s nothing better than hands-on, low-pressure experience, which investors can get via the virtual trading tools offered by many online stock brokers. Paper trading lets customers test their trading acumen and build up a track record before putting real dollars on the line.

Several of the brokers we review offer virtual trading, including TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers.

5. Measure your returns against an appropriate benchmark

This is essential advice for all types of investors — not just active ones. The bottom-line goal for picking stocks is to be ahead of a benchmark index. That could be the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (often used as a proxy for “the market”), the Nasdaq composite index (for those investing primarily in technology stocks) or other smaller indexes that are composed of companies based on size, industry and geography.

Measuring results is key, and if a serious investor is unable to outperform the benchmark (something even pro investors struggle to do), then it makes financial sense to invest in a low-cost index mutual fund or ETF — essentially a basket of stocks whose performance closely aligns with that of one of the benchmark indexes.

6. Keep your perspective

Being a successful investor doesn’t require finding the next great breakout stock before everyone else. By the time you hear that XYZ stock is poised for a pop, so have thousands of professional traders and the potential likely has already been priced into the stock. It may be too late to make a quick turnaround profit, but that doesn’t mean you’re too late to the party. Truly great investments continue to deliver shareholder value for years, which is a good argument for treating active investing as a hobby and not a Hail Mary for quick riches.