Stock Markets Exposed - Investment help for dummy please!!!?

Investment help for dummy please!!!?

I recently bought $46 worth of s&p500 from sharebuilder. I know nothing about investing and I think I would like to sell this and buy a different one. However, I need to know if this is a good or bad idea, I have no idea how to make money with stocks or how to determine what the value of spy is now and if I will have made a profit if I sell it or should I wait or something? I had $50 but it is $4 to buy a stock with sharebuilder. Please help, I am regreting having done anything since I don't know if what I did or what I wanna do is good or bad. actually there was a guy on here that recommended me to do this and now i just want to take my money out but want to know how much i will get back?

Public Comments

If you're young, invest in high risk companies. Do research before throwing your money away.
for all your financial questions go to www.primerica.com they are with citigroup so it will help you out. Im going to start for primerica and what i have heard in the interviews is great for our customers.
You should really do some homework on investing money in the stock market! Yahoo answers won't give you enough info to make an educated decision on what to do with your money. READ!
Looks like you can forget about your $46. It's good it was not much more. If you do not know about stocks, do not invest before you learn. Buy a book "Investing for Dummies." It's not a book, which will teach you how to get rich, but it will give you some tips in plain English.
Here is a free course on reading the charts and investing it will help you understand how it all works. Just send a blank e-mail to mailto:fullcourse@sendfree.com Good Luck
You should not sell it IMHO. If it's a $4 commission, that's more than 9% of your initial investment. Just hold it. I would suggest trying to do dollar cost averaging. Just set aside the same dollar amount each month and add it to your initial investment. See if you can save $100 each month and stick it in there. If you don't like SPY, you might want to look into some of the index funds offered by Vanguard. They're pretty cheap management fees and you don't have to monitor the investment.
wow so you know nothing about investments why on god green earth would you buy something like that if you don't know what your doing. You say you need help cus you don't know if it will be good or bad at this point it doesn't matter you didn't know what you were doing going in why not go out the same way... Your one of those people that go to a store and buy things you don't need or even will ever use aren't ya. Maybe you should talk with someone about spend money on just any ol thing
First, let me say that I think (and historical data supports me) that investing in stocks is the best way to grow your money over the long term. I also think SPY is a decent choice for a new investor. It's much less risky to have your money diversified across multiple stocks in multiple industries than to have it all in one stock (because if that one happens to go bad, you can lose a large portion of your investment). Because SPY includes stock of 500 companies, you are well diversified owning just that. For someone relatively young, I personally prefer MDY (mid-cap stocks) or IWM (small-cap stocks) because historically smaller company stock has done a little better than large company stock, but SPY is fine. Also, using a low-cost broker is very wise, so you've done a few things well...but... Here's the big problem I see with what you've done. Even a $4 commission on a $50 investment is 8% of your money! When you sell it's another 8%, so the stock has to go up 16% just for you to break even (at least - someone said they charge a lot more than $4 to sell so it might be a lot more that it has to go up to break even). The long-term average growth of the S&P 500 is somewhere around 10% per year, so on average it would take over a year and a half for your investment to grow enough just to cover the commission - if it's only $4 to sell also. Personally I would wait until I had AT LEAST $400 to invest so that the commission is only 1% on the buy (and 1% on the sell) so at least it only takes a couple months to recoup that cost...and it's far better to have an even larger amount so that the commission is only a fraction of a percent. Keeping your costs down is an important part of being a successful investor. Since you've already bought the SPY, what I'd do is just leave that there. Over time, it will eventually go up enough to be profitable. But for future purchases, I would save up a lot more money before buying more SPY (or MDY or IWM). So generally, I'd say you've got the right idea. You just need to watch the cost of the commission as a percentage of your investment and you'll do fine.
If you bought SPY you got a blend of stocks, not just one. You should hold it, and I would think you should add to it. If you don't know much about stocks, this keeps you from having just one. I have a sharebuilder account also and the cost to sell is like $20.00, not the $4 to buy. You could keep adding in small amounts over time to do dollar cost averaging, which is good. If you have a small amount to invest, I would save it up until you get a larger amount, maybe $100 and then buy through sharebuilder. Then the $4 isn't so big.
Sharebuilder is too expensive for you. I suggest you to open a brokerage account at SogoInvest.
i would read the following book. it is highly recommended for beginners. "intelligent investor "by benjamin graham