Expert: Dr. Joseph de Beauchamp - 2/20/2005

Question
Hi Dr. Joseph,  I recently wrote down 20 of my favorite companies and I created a porfolio on Yahoo.com to keep track of them.  I really want to get into buying and selling stocks but I really don't known where to begin.  Do you need a certain amount of money to open up an account?  Because I opened up a basic account with TDWaterhouse, And I don't know where to go from there.  They say you need a minumum of 1000 dollars to begin.  But I have about half of that.  Can I still start buying stocks?  or is there a better firm to buy and sell from? I don't want to transfer all my money from my checking account over to TDWaterhouse account, Is there any other way?  Any info, on certain web sites I could go to, to get me startedm, is greatly appreciated.  Thanks, Dan.

Answer
You might try http://wfnn.info and a free site. I do recommend that you stay with just mutual funds. There are some on the website to look over. Unless you are going to have over 10 stocks, invest and monitor the money, then a mutual fund in stocks is much less risky. I have never recommended stock buying unless a person has the time and money for more than ten stocks.

Dr. Joe de Beauchamp