New to stock investing

[Justin Nichols]

Hi members of BiggerPockets! My name is Justin Nichols and i am from the Hampton Roads, Virginia area. I am a current undergrad at ODU and graduating in May. i have no experience in stock investing but have been reading books on it in the past couple of days and would like to become more familiar and gain more knowledge before getting started. I am looking forward to gaining more knowledge and advice to be the best i can be. Thank You!

[Bill Goodland]

Welcome to BP Justin. It's great that you want to start getting educated on growing your wealth, but I hope you understand that this site is dedicated to real estate investing and not stock investing. I personally have been invest, and doing some trading of stocks and options for about 5 years and plan to put it towards real estate in the coming years. I suggest reading the ultimate beginners guide at www.biggerpockets.com/ubg and if you want to grow your savings through stocks I would suggest low cost index funds such as vanguard or ETFs for industries that you think have good growth potential(for example I have done well with semiconductor and tech company ETFs). If you want to be more active in trading, I would recommend checking out the free courses at optionalpha.com on the success strategies of options trading. One note worthy thing however, is that with real estate you can leverage an investment and have someone pay it off for you while you still have relatively good control of its performance(through good management, improvements etc.) however with a stock, you essentially are completely helpless if something goes wrong. Either way, money sitting in the bank is dead money so put it to good use, good luck!