Don�t be put off by the typical fears of novice investors: fear of the bafflingly technical Stock Market terminology; fear that your knowledge of financial affairs is not good enough for you to venture onto the trading floor; fear that the Stock Market will suffer a crash of the sort that invariably happens every few decades; fear of not having enough money to get all you want out of the Stock Market; fear of not having enough patience to wait for your investment to bear fruit; and fear that the markets may be riskier than they seem.

 

To try your hand at playing the markets as an investor you don�t need to be familiar with the language of investment managers, brokers and financial analysts. Some of these professionals use obscure and sophisticated terms just to intimidate and scare off any would be newcomers. And very often they succeed. The important thing for the novice investor to do is to learn the really useful terms, and all you need to do that is to get hold of any Stock Market investment manual. In any case, when a tyro investor finds a word they don�t understand they only have to ask an expert, since the expert is bound to feel flattered and will be only too pleased to take the opportunity to sound off about how much he or she knows about the subject.

 

The specialist financial papers and investment journals are an excellent aid to losing your fear of all those financial and business concepts, as are TV programmes on the Stock Market (such as Bloomberg TV) or financial web sites on the internet.

 

In the noble art of the Stock Market, success or failure is all about money. Given this simple truth, it makes sense to take some time to understand some basic notions before you start throwing your hard-earned capital around.

 

When you�re starting out, don�t trust your instincts or intuition and try to follow a method. Most often it�s better to follow a bad method than no method at all.

 

This last piece of advice also applies to stock market rumours or comments of the sort a friend of mine who is in the know told me to buy this or that share. This type of rumour is normally started to further the interests of some third party, which rarely coincide with the interests of the rest of the investment community.

 

On the Stock Market, as everywhere, there are unscrupulous people who wouldn�t think twice about ruining weaker or less informed people. This being the sad reality, investors should know at all times exactly what they are doing with their money. Banks and brokerage firms have advisors and brokers to give professional guidance to the novice investor in his exciting incursion into the world of financial markets.

 

The Stock Market is not the exclusive domain of millionaires. Nothing could be further from the truth, since there are all kinds of investment optiions to satisfy every type of investor profile. For example, in broad terms the average initial investment in investment funds is 2,500 euros; the minimum amount needed to buy into Government Bonds is around 1,000 euros.

 

To overcome the fear of stock market crashes you only need to look in the history books to see that the chances of the markets taking a real nosedive are highly remote: since the birth of the Stock Market in 1792 there have only ever been two crashes. The same books paint a very optimistic picture: if we look at the performance of security markets over the years we can see that stock market investments are always profitable in the long term.

 

Finally, if market analysts had to choose just one piece of advice out of all the many they hand out every day, they would all be certain to recommend diversification. That is, to spread the risk among different sectors so the losses made by shares in one area are hopefully offset by gains in another. 

 

On line advisors
Practically all online banks and Net based stock market services use the investment tools developed by the Spanish company Techrules. This service offers "buy or sell" type trading advice on 20,000 assets from all over the world based on complex statistical and mathematical models, and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not only that but these applications don�t care how much money you have to invest; their recommendations are equally as valid whether you�re investing 3,000 � or 3 million.