Author: Andrea | Date: February 20, 2010 | Please Comment!

When you make the decision to get into stocks, your first question to yourself might be how to buy stock online. This is a very good question, but it is also pretty darn broad as well because you really have at least three or more options available to you.

Before making ANY decisions with any company or any stock investment, make sure you do your research! If possible, start out low and work your way up until you start to understand how this works! First off, you have full-service brokers, then you have discount brokers and last you have online brokers.

For the most part a full service broker is going to have the most advice to give you ie; full-service. But, in the same way that any full-service company works, this is also going to be the more expensive option.

I think you have to look at your experience over what you are willing to pay. If you do not have a lot of experience with stocks and you do not paying into it, this is a good option for you. These full-service brokers will keep an eye open for your picks and they will chime in when they think you should make any changes to the stock.

Second off, for the discounters, this will cost less than the full-service, but it is also going to take you more knowledge and expertise to figure out how to go about this. It is your responsibility completely!

They offer much less advice than the full-service so make sure you really know where and what to research. Thirdly, you have the online brokers. These are websites like E-trade, Scottrade, Schwab, etc. With this you do not get any advice per se from an individual, however, there is SO much information on these websites its like info-overload.

You still need to have some kind of an understanding about how this works. You cannot just go in there, buy everything up, and expect to make something in return. So this is less-advice, but it is also MUCH cheaper. Full-service brokers get paid on the percentage of stocks you purchase – they live on commission.

Which is one of the reasons we think they are the better choice because if YOU make money THEY make money. The discount brokers have stocks for $10-$20 per 1100 shares. And the online brokers cost $9-$15! These are the most popular ways on how to buy stock online. If you find other ways, superb. But, they might not be legit! Remember to always do your homework!

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