What help is there out there to help me with buying stocks and shares?

i’ve lost 2 grand last month on managed funds…...be careful.

I was awesome with 401k and only lost 8 bucks during the big crash 2 or 3 year ago.

You might find some of the advice in this previously asked question to be helpful. There are numerous websites that you can use to learn about the stock market. Some of the complexity behind analyzing stocks doesn’t make it conducive to video instruction per se, but there is lots of great information out there. www.fool.com is an excellent source of information, and has great forums. www.weseed.com is an online simulation that lets you invest with pretend money, and provides learning opportunities.

I remember an experiment with a monkey and a stock broker chooseing stock and the monkey, because he was innocent of too much thought, choose better. Google it.
I think buying stock is a sort of craps shoot or horse race betting type of “luck”
Do not bet unless you have silly money to loose.
I would check out the buy your own stock websites and the ones in the @PandoraBoxx answer.

@MaryW, that was in a book called “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” by Burton G. Malkiel. There are excellent outlines of the book online because a lot of universities use it. The theory was that if you pinned the stock quote page to a bulletin board, then had a blindfolded monkey throw ten darts at the page, the stocks selected would perform as well as those selected by careful analysis.

I’ve lost (on paper) the same % in my two Vanguard tax-free funds as I have gained in my common stock portfolio (most of which I have owned for donkey’s ages and all of which continue to pay a nice dividend. I am not factoring in the dividends, which I spend, as part of the stocks’ increase.)

There is another fund experiment called “The Lazy Portfolios,” or something similar. Seven or eight hotsy-totsy experts and a third grader picked some funds. They all did about the same in the long term.

ehow has a list of videos on how to invest in the market.

An excellent book is “The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need,” which had been updated. Important is the fact that it helps you avoid unwise investment decisions.

@ItsAHabit: I bet that the one sure thing is that the author gets royalties for every copy sold.