I'm new...

[IIC]

Welcome Hammer Time...First thing you need to determine is your goals and how much time you can spend on the markets...Basically, I'd say the less time you spend the longer your avg. hold time will probably be. That's not always true of course...There's many longer term investors who spend a lot of time on it...But I don't see too many successful short term traders who consistently do well w/o being right on top of things(or trying to anyway) whenever they are trading.

You don't necessarily have to be one specific type of trader/investor either...I trade long, intermediate, swing and day...But to start I'd recommend concentrating on Intermediate term type trades and take it slow...Best, Doug(IIC)

[Thors Hammer]

There are a lot of different programs out there for tracking. What characteristics should I look for in a program, and what type of analysis should it be capable off.

TH

[ParkTwain]

Before you think of putting any of your money to work, you have to learn what actually makes stock prices rise and fall in the market (more than just day-to-day fluctuations, rumors, and "sympathy" movements that echo other stocks). This is not an easy study in itself. It will lead you to learning about how and when companies communicate with Wall St and with the SEC, industry relative strength/weakness, company fundamentals, price support and resistance levels shown on a stock price chart, price/earnings ratio, price/earnings ratio to earnings growth ratio, and more. Your degree of understanding of what makes stock prices rise and fall will greatly determine how you will choose to approach trading, or whether you will "trade" (make your profit from changes in stock prices) at all versus investing (make your profit from increases in underlying asset values).

Go to Amazon.com and do a search within Books for "Jack Schwager" and read his "wizard" books. I would also recommend reading John Train's "Money Masters" books (at least 2 of them were published); these will give you some 20th century context for how to think about investing from a non-technical point of view by way of interviews with the practitioners (Buffett, Tisch, Soros, and many others).

I also recommend Nicolas Darvas's book "How I Made $2 Million in the Stock Market" which shows how a motivated amateur figured out how to make money by looking for stock price breakouts from an established price range (which is a very simple practice of "technical" analysis).

To learn in a nonthreatening way about reading stock charts and identifying stock chart patterns, read William Jiler's "How Charts Can Help You in the Stock Market."

I also would recommend Van K. Tharp's book "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom" which describes very methodically how to set up an approach to trading that builds on your successful trades.

Finally, do lots of reading of the articles at http://www.investopedia.com/. They can be very helpful for a beginner.

//PT