help me I'm a rookie!

[htpeeps]

I just recently begun taking interest in stocks(401k my biggest reason).So I haven't a clue about anything.My question is what do the points mean?(Ex. 86.52) I know it sounds like a stupid question, but i hope someone can clarify for me. Thank You

[Fredledingue]

86.52 means 86 dollars 52 cents.

HTH

[Airelon]

No stupid questions mate. Fred answered that one well enough.

We seem to be starting a bear market (Meaning prices can fall as much as 30% or more over the course of a year) for the last month or so, so this makes finding good stocks to buy extremely difficult.

I'd personally use this time to educate yourself as to

1) The difference between investing and trading (401k is an investment. Day traders and Swing traders are just that - traders)
2) Money Management principles and Strategies
3) How the markets work
4) Strategies for entering the market
5) Other related material - as long as it's not hyped with huge houses, fast cars and big breasted women (there are a lot of scammers and crooks in this business)

There are a lot of wonderful educational sites out there. Investopedia. StockTradingToGo. There are a lot of people here on this forum that have wonderful insight, and give extremely intelligent comments and the reasons for their thoughts. I run my own education for a type of investor and trader. InformedTrades has a lot of good stuff.

Just be careful. When you see what is called "the hype" pop-up? It's time to be careful. A lot of people around this industry will want to sell you some magical system that's supposed to make it all easy and wonderful and give you the life you've always wanted. The worst of those scammers are easy to pick out. The most adept of them are very, very good at what they do. As a matter of fact, DoublingStocks was just discovered to be a scam through and through, but they fooled Google themselves.

There is a lot of free information out there from many sources. I'd personally take this time to educate yourself on what I listed, #'s 1-3. Too many people jump straight to #4 - and end up losing money.

[Novice Investing]

htpeeps:

You might want to be familiar with the concept of fair value. You bought a stock below its fair value and sell it at or above fair value. If you do that, no matter what the general market is doing, you can rest assure that your stock will eventually go up. Let us know if you have any other question.

[EvaluatingStocks]

100% agree with Airelon. Use the time now to learn - there are a ton of good books out there for beginners. Right now, you need to focus on the basics for your 401k and make sure you minimize your costs and are diversified. I recommend John Bogle's "The Little Book of Commonsense Investing" for beginners. It sounds corny but it really is good - plus Bogle founded Vanguard which is one of the biggest fund companies around.

[Airelon]

Sort of funny. Got the update today that this thread had been updated. It's a bit of synchronicity. For the last few days at my video blog, I've been having a series of videos that talk about "How to Begin". There are a couple of videos after that one, and the last one will be tommorow. Subscribe if you like what you see.

Sort of weird when the forum topics link right up to what I've been talking about as of late.