You just opened an invesment accout with your favorite “commission free” broker, put some serious money into it, and now you don’t know what to do next.
Which stock should I buy? And how do you place an order to buy your first stock? and what are all those order options? this is all very confusing.
If this is you, keep reading. Placing an order for your first trade can actually be pretty simple once you know these 5 things:
👉 Know which stock to buy for your investment to start. For this to happen, you need to know the stock ticker, or stock symbol
The stock symbol is an universal code to locate your stocks, usually a series of letter like XYZ, for example for Microsoft, the stock symbol is MSFT.
It’s like an ID card for your stock, without it, you can’t trade that stock.
They are easy to find though, your broker will have a way to convert the company stock you want to buy into stock symbols.
If you are buying the stocks in your WealthVenue 1-2-3 portfolio, the ticker or symbol for each stock card will be display in black on the top left corner.
👉 Choose the Order Action, it will be a BUY if you want to invest into that stock, or SELL if you already own that stock and want to exit your investment with the profits you have made.
👉 Choose the Order/Price Type carefully.
It’s often preferable to select ‘LMT’ aka Limit Order, and not ‘MKT’ aka Market Order. LMT orders will give you full control of your investment cost while MKT orders are always more expensive. See below for why.
👉 How much money do you want to invest in that stock?
It’s pretty simple actually, like buying fruits at the supermarket. Each stock sells for a price per share or per unit, therefore you will need to enter a price and a quantity of shares.
Your broker might offer the option to put a total amount and do the conversion to price and quantity instead.
But if you have a Market Order aka MKT, that price and quantity will be determined automatically by your broker and this means your investment cost might be higher than expected. Your higher investment costs will negatively impact any future gains you might have.
👉 Finally, choose the Duration/Time Limit for the order.
By default, it’s GFD (Good-For-Day), that is the order will expire at the end of the day. This is what you want.
You can now press Submit or Place Order and wait for your price and quantity to be executed by your broker.
Congrats, you are now an investor in that stock.
If all this is too complicated to remember, do not worry. It’s all there in your WealthVenue 1-2-3 stock cards.
Each symbol and the amount to invest is displayed in each stock card, and if you click on How to Invest, it will show each step to follow to process your order.
And if you don’t know which stocks to buy or where to invest, your WealthVenue 1-2-3 will have 3 safe stock cards for you to invest into.