How to Buy a Stock

It’s one of the most important skills a person in today’s society must have… yet it’s not taught in schools.

Nearly every day we receive notes from readers who want to take advantage of our numerous stock recommendations, yet they don’t know where to begin.

It explains why more folks in America own homes than stocks.

That’s a fact worth repeating…

More Americans would rather take out an expensive mortgage and shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house… than plunk down a hundred bucks (or less!) to get their stake in an investment that could eventually fund their lifestyle.

It’s insane.

But we don’t blame the people. We blame the lack of Know-How. Again… none of this is taught in schools.

Easy Money

The good news is that buying or selling a stock is far from hard. If you can check your email, you can buy a stock.

Perhaps the hardest part of investing is knowing what stocks to buy and when to sell them. There’s roughly 3,500 companies with shares trading on U.S. exchanges. Figuring out which are worthy of your investing dollars is tough business.

But that’s why we created Manward Letter and, especially, Manward Trader. Subscribers don’t have to do any of the work. We send them the name of the company and its ticker symbol… and even tell them what price to pay.

For example, Manward Trader recently took a 310% gain on shares of Weight Watchers.

Subscribers received an alert telling them about the opportunity. It would have concluded like this:

Action to Take: Buy shares of Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW) under $21.

Easy. But that’s where so many investors get stuck. They don’t know how to make the trade.

Let’s fix that.

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How to Trade a Stock

To get started, you must open an account with a brokerage. We recommend nearly any of the online discount houses:

• Fidelity
• TD Ameritrade
• JPMorgan Chase
• Robinhood
• Charles Schwab
• E-Trade

They all work well and are quite competitive. Just this week, for example, JPMorgan announced it will offer free online trades to customers. That’s huge.

For our purposes, we’ll show you how to make the trade above using TD Ameritrade – a fair representative of an online trading platform.

Again, if you can open an email account, you can open a brokerage account. It’s simple and takes less than five minutes.

From there, you’ll gain immediate access to the broker’s trade platform. It should look something like this (click the image for a full-size view):

If the broker’s home page looks complicated, the designers did their jobs. Online brokers purposefully make their homepages look complex. It’s an effort to convince the user that they’ve got access to all sorts of bells and whistles they can’t find anywhere else.

Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.

Simply look for the for “Trade” section.

With TD Ameritrade, it’s in the lower left portion of the screen and looks like this:

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It’s much simpler. Now you can start to see what needs to happen to make the trade.

Virtually all the information we need is included in the alert from above.

First, we’ll enter the ticker symbol. In this case, it’s WTW.

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You’ll also see that we are buying a quantity of 20 shares. That’s the only important item that’s not included in the alert. That figure is up to you and your unique financial situation.

Once we have the quantity and the ticker info, we move on to the price we want to pay.

Of course, we can’t name just any price and expect to get our order filled. But we can set some limits. In the example above, we say to buy shares under $21.

That means we must set a “limit order.”

It looks like this:

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As soon as we enter the limit price, the “Review Order” button turns green. It means we’re just about done.

With another click of the mouse, we see a summary of our trade.

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It gives us a chance to review the trade we’re about to make.

On the left, you can see that we’re about to purchase 20 shares of Weight Watchers, using a limit price of $21 per share. Once the trade is complete, our account will be debited $420.00 (that’s $21 x 20 shares).

On the right, you can see a few more details, mainly the current selling activity. In this case, you can see the last price the stock sold for was $74.43. (That price is well outside our limit price… after all, shares have quadrupled in value since we issued the alert above).

From here, simply click “Place Order,” and the trade is made.

Easy. It should take less than a minute.

It’s simple yet critical “Know-How.”

If nobody else will teach it, we gladly will.

P.S. If you’re looking to make your first trade today, we just released the ticker symbols of 10 fast-moving penny stocks that any investor can afford. But due to the sensitive nature of what’s in this presentation, we insist that viewers first sign a nondisclosure agreement. We don’t want this strategy and these tickers to get leaked. Click here for the details.