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Are you thinking about investing in the stock market? Before you go any further you need to ask yourself one question: "Am I really ready to buy my first share?" This article should help you answer that first question. If you then think you're ready, here are some next steps. Firstly, I'd urge you to read as much as possible. The Financial Times is still the best news source, both online and offline, and some of its opinion articles are excellent. If you don't like the FT, there's normally some good content in the City pages of the other "quality" newspapers. The Investor's Chronicle is also worth a read. Reading around should give you a feel for the different characteristics of each stock market sector. For example, you'd normally expect shares in a bank such as Lloyds TSB (LSE: LLOY) to be lower risk than a loss-making technology company like NXT (LSE: NTX). No guarantees though, Lloyds TSB could be hit if the economy nosedives, while NXT might surprise cynics and finally take off. Reading investment books can help too. Secondly, I'd suggest you take a look at our investment service, Champion Shares. If you haven't got much time, you can quickly see which shares have been recommended and buy them. We will do the work for you. But if you can find some space in your diary and you want to learn about investment, then we think you'll find Champion Shares even more useful. That's because each recommendation is accompanied by a detailed write-up, ensuring members understand why the company is being tipped. Even if you don't buy the share, reading the commentary should give you pointers on what to look for when you make your own selections. Whatever your approach, our Champion Shares picks have certainly done pretty well so far. The average gain for the portfolio is 17.5% whereas the equivalent figure for the FTSE All-Share index is 12.1%* Sign up for a FREE 30-day trial to Champion Shares and you can read all of the recommendations. What's more, Champion Shares editor Maynard Paton, also writes commentary on other interesting shares. Recently he's written about GCap Media (LSE: GCAP), Domestic & General (LSE: DGG), Domino Printing Sciences (LSE: DNO) and Chariot (LSE: CRT) amongst others. Nevertheless the best education is probably practice. One approach is to set up a paper portfolio of your favourite shares. You can do this at Yahoo Finance and other sites. Then sit back and see how they do. Be careful though. Your decision making may be very different if no real money is involved. Perhaps the best idea is to spend a couple of months reading and watching. Then make some small investments with hard cash. Hopefully, you can then become a market-beating investor. Don't forget to sign up for a free 30-day trial to Champion Shares. You could read all of Maynard's recommendations right now. * These performance figures are based on mid-prices taken at the time of recommendation and include due dividends and exclude costs. An earlier version of this article was published in January 2006.
