How's your stock trading doing? Have you been successful in the past ten years? Or has your 401K or personal investing account been sucked dry the gyrations of the stockmarket over the past few years?

Are you looking to get started with your first time investments? Or are you now dipping your toes back in trading because you want to rescue your current investment from its double digit losses?

Can you answer 'yes'...?

You've read the newspapers, you've watched the TV news, perhaps you've even dabbled less than successfully with a few stocks ...

Successful Stock Trading aims to take you from setting your foundations right through to finding and making successful stock trades.

While we won't tell you which stocks to buy or sell, I'll be giving you examples of what works, what doesn't, and tips on managing your money and your investing.

This site should be especially appropriate if you can answer 'yes' to any of the following questions:

• Have you bought and held only to find some stocks go to $0?
• Have you lost a lot of your portfolio in the recent market gyrations?
• Have you traded in and out of stocks with no clear goals or direction or profits?
• Are you facing personal finance troubles and suspect that stock investing or stock trading could help you get out of them?

Your Financial Journey Begins...

This site started out as a personal journey on another website, a journey for me that began in 1995. What happened you may ask? One of life's turning points: my marriage. For many people, the onset of marriage, the birth of a child, the prospect of retirement or redundancy, all act to focus the mind on one's personal finances.

While I take you through the steps to successful stock trading, I will encourage, describe and examine the basic steps in light of my own personal experience. However, each of your own situations may be quite different from mine, and the story of how you arrived at your current place also different. As you correspond with me, I'll try to offer my own insights, too.

Start at the very beginning

For those interested in stock trading, it's a risky field, but one thing is certain: everyone needs proper foundations. By building up your foundations before you start investing, you will lay the the concrete for a stronger and much more satisfying experience in the stock market.

So let's take a look at the basic steps to successful stock trading.

Order, order!

Step 1: put your financial house in order

In the excitement to invest or trade stocks, many investors risk losing (and do lose) their shirts because what starts out as a gamble on a hot tip often means that person's savings have gone down the tube, or perhaps even their next mortgage payment or more.

So putting your finances in good stead, though the least exciting part of the journey to successful stock trades, is in fact the most important.

You will learn the basics of how to budget, why to pay down high interest loans, the risks of borrowing. More than this, you will gain an insight into the laying of your foundations. You will also find out how and why you should set aside some real savings in the bank, even before you make your first successful trade.

This blog doesn't aim to be a personal finance blog, so we won't necessarily delve as deeply into this area as could be done. You'll be pointed to other resources for that.

Ready, set, ... wait!

Step 2: We will find out about the stockmarket, what trading is, ways to trade stocks, which brokers are best, and which are suitable for successful stock trading. We'll also look briefly at the different markets you can invest in: stocks, bonds, commodities, options, and much more.

We may even do some paper trading to help you see what mistakes you might make, and we'll look at some online tools for those.

Risk vs. Reward

Step 3: We'll look at what kind of risk profile and rewards you are looking for by taking part in the stockmarket.

Are you looking for early retirement, saving for a house, your child's education or you just want to be 'rich'... Whichever of these is your situation, we may have some suggestions that you could look at to help you manage risk, review your risk profile, and determine what your longer term goals are.

Nitty Gritty

Step 4: This gets down to looking at some of the companies on offer and examines how to read financials for the fundamental investor. We'll also be having a look at some stock portfolios that you could trade. Although I won't be suggesting particular trades, we'll look at some strategies and ways of organizing your portfolios.

Research, read, and reward

Why do all the good words start with 're'? Simply because it's your REsponsibility to do your own due diligence (check out any trades/stocks and information) on what you intend to buy or sell. No one else can do this for you. Nor should they. Many a pundit will want you to follow their model, their trades, and charge you a PRETTY PENNY for this information.

I won't. That's my promise to you. I'll provide as much good value information as I can. Of course, you need to consider my input carefully before you make your decision. After all, it's better to make your own decisions using your own research rather than accept the glib tenets and tired advice of some commission-based 'expert', isn't it? That's my aim, simply.

Qualified? Hell, no!

What qualifications do I bring to this whole affair? None. I'm a teacher who fell into business, started working on website development and reading about the stock market in depth nearly 15 years ago. I've traded stocks through the dot com boom era, earning a decent return before losing it all in the bust that followed.

I've clawed my way back with some effort to a portfolio that is currently worth around 50% of the dotcom boom period, but with a monthly dividend, and about 10% in cash at the moment. And I've decided to share my experience with you in the hope that you will learn from my mistakes, enjoy reading my website, and may even find a few decent resources to help you in your quest for successful stock trading.

The right tools: the right know-how!

Thoughts for investors:

Sometimes you have to act without having certainty. That is not to say you are acting irrationally. You are just acting with incomplete information. And sometimes you have to bide your time. Wisdom comes from being able to discern what course of action is required at the given point in time.

Either way, you are going to need the right tools to help you do successful stock trading, aren't you? And in these crazy times, this goes doubly so, after all... Don't forget to read my disclaimer, though!

To read more from Successful-Stock-Trading, have a look at our article index or keep up with our news by subscribing to our 'feed'.

Whatever investing you decide to do, remember:

* no investment is guaranteed,
* any returns need a combination of research and insight and guts
* and avoid loss of principal.

ABOUT THIS TEMPLATE:

This particular template is a 'medium difficulty' design, and has been designed so that the text elements of the design will be very easy to edit (just by accessing the designer for the relevant panel).

The graphical elements within this design can be edited if required but are a little more difficult to access than some of the other templates (some images are table backgrounds, for example). These should only be changed if you are familiar with editing pages in this way.

Here are a few pointers to help you with
any customization you might want to do

To make changes to the general style of the pages for your site - the Page Layout - you edit the settings in the configuration boxes on the left-hand side of the Page Layout tab. In this version of XSitePro there are nine sections of a typical web page that can be customized using the Page Layout controls.

Here's a brief description of each one:

Header - This is located at the very top of the page. Often it will include a logo or header graphic that includes the web site's name.

Info-Bar - This is a horizontal section of the page in which you can insert navigation, banner graphics, Adsense or other elements. It sits directly below the Header Panel and so commands a very important piece of your page's real-estate.

Left Panel - Under the Header Panel, and to the left of the Main Panel where the main body copy of the web page appears. Here you will often find links to all of the important pages on a web site, as well as other 'persistent' elements: mailing-list sign-up forms, advertisements, etc.

Main Panel Header - Immediately above the Main Panel is the Main Panel Header. This header only stretches the width of the main panel itself (unlike the Header Panel, which streches across the whole page, not just the Main Panel). Suitable uses for the Main Panel Header might include navigational elements, graphics, advertising or textual elements - all of which will appear at the head of every page, above the Main Panel content.

Main Panel - This is where the body copy for your web site will appear. This is of course the most important element of your pages - the informational element - and not something that can be pre-written for you. You need to spend time on your main panel content, creating genuine, quality content (or sourcing ready-written content of comparable quality). The 'pages' you create within your site are what populate the Main Panel.

Main Panel Footer - At the bottom of the Main Panel is the Main Panel Footer. With XSitePro you have a choice of whether you have a footer that stretches the full width of the page or whether the footer excludes the left and right column and appears immediately under the main body of text. You can also have both at the same time if you wish. For example, you may want to have various links to pages appear under the main body copy and a copyright message on the page footer.

Right Panel - This is the space between the Main Panel and the right page margin. People often include testimonials or banner advertisements in this section.

Page Footer - This is the section that appears immediately below the left and right columns and the main body of the page. Often it will include a copyright message and may include a reminder of the web page URL. You may also wish to use the footer for links to those pages which (while important to some sites) you don't wish to clutter the main navigational menu(s) with. Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions pages are good examples of such pages.

Margins - These appear on both the left and right side of the web page although with XSitePro you can, if you wish, choose to have the page left justified and only have a margin on the right hand side of the page. You can also specify how much of the background you can see, if any, above and/or below the page.

More information on how to use the Page Layout tab can be found in the XSitePro manual or in the context sensitive help system.