Thanks, guys! Very helpful. I’m not looking to day trade. I’d like to pick 2-3 of my own and maybe dump the other half in some mutual funds. I don’t know. Need to read up a lot more. It’s just kind of a daunting start. cyfanbr, I’d definitely be interested in any suggested reading.
With time you will find your own style of investing and that’s is very important. You have to find a strategy that fits you. In my opinion where most investors fail is on the psychological portion of it, meaning people make wrong decisions that driven by emotions instead of facts and or probabilities.
With that being said I think the best place to start is by reading some of Meb Faber’s book, especially the ones about asset allocation. You can download their PDFs for free on his website and they are all fairly short reads. Meb does a good job of laying out some portfolio strategies that are very rule based, which is important in controlling your emotions during the markets ups and downs.
Once you have a base investing strategy/portfolio, sounds like you will also be interested in doing some individual stock picks. At this point I’d highly recommend you keep these individual picks as a very small portion of your overall investment. Especially as you still new and learning, maybe no more than 10% of your portfolio.
As far as individual picks go, I am big value investor believer. So I’d recommend reading some Peter Lynch, Books about Buffet, etc. at some point I am sure you will run into a book called “The Intelligent Investor” I found it to be a pretty hard read, but a good one. I’d save it and read it much later once you are more comfortable with financial terms. Through you this process you will likely start to learn about some of the successful value guys.
Podcasts, I really like the Curious Investor by AQR and We Study Billionaires by the Investor’s Podcast Network.
Feel free to PM me anytime you have questions and what not. I am always looking for folks to talk investing hahaha.