Beginners Guide To Buying And Selling Shares – Investing in the stock market is one of the best ways to grow your savings over the long term. If you’re just starting out, it can seem like there’s a lot to learn before you start buying stocks. But the reality is much simpler. One of the most important factors is just getting started. This guide will cover everything you need to know to start investing in the stock market. Before you dive in, it’s important to remember that when you invest, your capital is at risk. This means that the value of your investments can go up and down, so you may get back less than what you originally invested. Remember that everyone has their own unique financial circumstances and goals. These, along with your investment risk tolerance and time horizon, should inform the asset mix you choose for your portfolio. Our Stock Market Investing Resource Center can help make this mix a little clearer for you, and our guide to investing in stocks is a great start to your investment decisions. beginner And if you’re still not sure how to choose investments, talk to a qualified financial advisor to develop your own investment strategy.
🎯 Key Takeaways Investing in stocks is one of the best ways to grow your savings over the long term. Time is the most important growth ingredient, the longer you can leave your investments to grow the better. Don’t complicate it. Build a diversified portfolio, invest regularly and don’t get caught up; check back from time to time.
Beginners Guide To Buying And Selling Shares
Simply put, investing is putting money aside today with the goal of making it worth more in the future.
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Keeping cash in the bank is one way to save, but when it comes to growing your savings, it’s unlikely to be the best option.
Often, prices will rise (in economic terms, this is inflation). It’s not really a short-term issue – £1,000 today will be close to £1,000 tomorrow or even next month.
This makes cash a good choice for your emergency savings or money you’ll need to use soon. But over a longer period of time, your cash savings will begin to lose value.
Here’s an example of how rising prices can affect the value of your cash, the longer you leave it.
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Disclaimer: The table shows how inflation can erode savings over the years. This table is for illustrative purposes only and does not use actual inflation rates.
Investing is about growing your wealth over the long term. The goal is to achieve a return that exceeds inflation so that your real wealth grows and your purchasing power is greater in the future.
Investing in the stock market has historically been a good way to do this. If you have a long-term focus, it will probably stay that way.
When you buy a share in a company, you become the owner of the company. And as an owner, you’ll participate in the ups and downs of the business that cause the stock’s value to go up and down over time.
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Some companies also pay out part of their profits (known as dividends) to investors and this is another way of sharing in the success of a business.
In exchange for becoming a business owner and taking on the risk of potential ups and downs in performance, investors have historically been rewarded with a higher rate of return on their cash and an opportunity to grow their savings .
Stock markets are where we go to buy and sell stocks, they are our access point for investing in stocks.
Before we get stuck into how to invest, it’s important to understand why the stock market can be a good place for your savings.
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In the long run, economies tend to grow. They grow because populations grow (in most places) and so does productivity (our ability to produce more goods and services with the same pair of hands). If economies grow over the long term, it’s fair to assume that company profits as a whole should grow as well.
Over time, stock prices tend to follow underlying earnings growth. And that’s why if we show you a chart of a stock market, in the long run it goes up.
Do they get up all the time? No. Stock markets are designed to move as they gather new information—the good, the bad, and the good.
Some people invest to save for their retirement. Others may have a specific future purchase in mind or simply want to beat inflation.
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Understanding your goals is important because it should help establish investment foundations, such as how much to invest and what to invest in.
The simplest way to think about risk is how much money you are comfortable losing in exchange for seeing it gain value. The more risk you take, in general, the more you stand to lose or win.
How comfortable you are with risk, and in turn how much you’re willing to take on, will depend on your circumstances and things like:
If you are investing for a long period of time, you can probably afford to take on more risk than someone who will have to sell their investments in the near future.
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If you don’t have a lot of cash, either to invest or to save, you probably want to take less risk than someone with millions in the bank.
As we discussed, shares represent ownership of a company and give you the opportunity to share in the current or future success of a business.
Many reputable companies have stocks that you can buy. This could be everything from global tech names or big banks to popular fashion brands and car brands.
But it doesn’t just have to be big companies, many smaller companies also have shares. Smaller companies tend to attract more adventurous investors, they may be newer companies with more to prove.
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Some company shares can be expensive. In the past, this may have meant that they were out of reach for many.
But today, several stockbrokers offer investors access to fractional shares. These are parts of a single share that you can buy. For example, if a stock costs $1,000, you could buy half, or $500 worth, of that stock.
You don’t have to choose each individual action if you don’t want to. With an exchange-traded fund (ETF), you can invest in a collection of stocks or other assets all at once.
In the financial world, an index is a group of stocks or other assets combined and used to analyze or understand the performance of a market as a whole.
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For example, the S&P 500 is an index made up of the 500 largest companies listed on the US stock market.
An ETF that tracks the S&P 500 is a simple way to invest in the companies that make up the index.
From a practical point of view, this is much cheaper and faster than buying shares in each of these 500 companies. It also gives investors a more diversified portfolio, reducing the risk that they could lose a large amount of money.
The downside to ETFs is that they mean you can’t capture the outsized returns that individual stocks can sometimes make. You may also be subject to market downturns, some of which may have a lasting impact on returns.
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💡 What is an ETF and how do ETFs work? 📱 Check out the most popular ETFs you can invest in using the investment app.
Once established, they are listed on a stock exchange, allowing investors to buy shares in them.
For example, an investment trust might focus on buying stocks in the technology industry. Others hold a wider range of stocks and invest in industries as varied as telecommunications, finance and energy.
Like ETFs, investment trusts are a great way to invest in many different stocks or assets at once.
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💡 What is an investment trust? 📱 See the full list of investment trusts you can invest with.
As the name suggests, REITs invest in real estate. They are a great way for people to put money into the real estate market, without having to pay huge amounts to actually buy a property.
REITs also tend to invest in different types of properties, meaning you could be exposed to everything from retail to data centers to digital infrastructure.
You may have heard of IPOs (initial public offerings) and SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies) before. They tend to be one of the most talked about topics when it comes to investing.
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This often happens because, unlike the different types of investments we mentioned above, both IPOs and SPACs allow investors to invest in companies that have just gone public. They may not be new companies (although they are often younger), but they are new investment opportunities.
IPOs and SPACs work in different ways that we won’t go into here, you can learn more about them in our guide to IPOs and our guide to SPACs.
A key thing to know about investing in both IPOs and SPACs is