HACKER Q&A
📣 hahnchen

How to Get into Stocks and Finance in 2022?


Hello. I have my internship coming up and I’ll have my own money for the first time!

I want to get into stocks and other financial things like forex, etc. What do you recommend to learn this stuff?

I’m also interested in seeing how the financial world really works. I think it would help me in making more money. Are there any resources for that?

  👤 emrah Accepted Answer ✓
Here are my suggestions:

Pay off any high interest debt first, like credit card debt.

Then put some money aside for emergencies.

Put aside more money, like 6 months living expenses worth.

After these, if you have a mortgage, you might consider paying extra each month to pay it off quicker and save on interest payments.

After these, you might start thinking about "investing".

Playing with stocks, especially forex, is just gambling. If you want to go that route, just know full well that you are gambling with your hard earned money.

If you want to get started investing instead, start looking into buying index funds first.

Then read about how to invest in companies if you really want to dip into buying individual companies

Good luck

👤 japhyr
A Random Walk Down Wall Street was one of the original books that laid out the case for index funds over picking stocks to build a portfolio. It's been in print for decades.

It's not prescriptive, but the baseline of information it provides still gives really solid grounding for making sense of all that you see in the financial space. There's so much noise out there, and a good book like this helps you cut through so much that's hype and profit-seeking. (Profit for them, not for you as an investor.)

👤 imakwana
One of the best introduction to investing for an individual investor is William Bernstein's Four Pillars of Investing

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portf...

For learning how financial world really works, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street is absolutely phenomenal.

👤 baremetal
save your money in cash.

once you have 10k or so saved then consider putting /some/ additional income into an index fund every month. probably a better use is reinvesting into yourself and increasing your skills.

i would stay away from forex and options and buying individual stocks.

i would recommend learning accounting and finance, perhaps taking a class at a junior college. apply the knowledge to reading financial statements of companies and deriving knowledge about their operations. i do it as a hobby. i occasionally invest in individual stocks in this manner. but i wouldnt race into putting my handful of dollars into the markets.

cash is king in this environment.