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INTRODUCTION
A former janitor and gas station attendant in Vermont, who died a few years ago, surprised everyone by leaving an $8 million fortune to his local library and hospital.
What was his secret, everyone wondered?  And the answer turned out to be pretty basic.  Because, besides being industrious and frugal, which you may have guessed, he had invested in the stock market throughout the years.
This is actually not as surprising as it may sound.  According to a recent World Wealth Report, the wealthy invest the largest part of their money into stocks and businesses.  Our wise janitor had simply done what the wealthy do.  So he got a similar result.  That is, he grew his money into considerable wealth.
And you can do this too.  Now, we aren’t saying you will make $8 million.  After all, this is a beginner’s book and the janitor had an extraordinary result.  But stock market investing is one of the best tools you can use to build a more secure financial future for you and your family.
So are you someone who wants to make money in the stock market?  And does that story make you feel excited?  Have you tried to understand the stock market, only to be discouraged by how complicated it all seems?  And aren’t you just a little bit encouraged that an ordinary person, like our janitor from Vermont, could invest in stocks and succeed?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then this book just might be the solution you’ve been looking for.  Because it will show you just what you need to know, and no more, to start investing in the stock market.
And it will describe all of this for you in simple terms you already understand.  Not complicated theory.  Not a mind-numbing blitz of technical buzzwords.  Just what you need to know and no more.  And the few specific steps you can take to get started.
So that by the end of this book, you will be able to buy your first stock.  You will know the simple steps to grow your money in the stock market.  And start on your path to a more secure financial future.
How To Use This Book
You may be surprised that there are not that many steps to be taken.  There are only seven of them.  So with that in mind, here is how we will cover them.
Section 1 is what you are reading now.  It’s an “Introduction.”  Let’s be realistic here.  We won’t shoot for a lofty goal of $8,000,000.  This is just a beginner’s book.  But we can definitely shoot for you increasing your wealth and making money over time with your stocks.
Then in Section 2 we answer the important question, “Why Invest In Stocks?”  Just like the janitor in Vermont, stocks are a very important part of your wealth strategy.  They are even more important today, as many other investments, like savings accounts and bonds, pay you very little.
But stocks, over time, have consistently grown wealth.  Virtually all wealthy people use them, and you should too.  So we will show you why stock investing can be so important to your financial health, and how this is one of the best times to get started and invest.
I think you will be surprised at some of the reasons.  Some that you may not have thought about.
Section 3 is called “Basic Information About The Stock Market.”  And we really mean basic information here — just what you need to know to get started and no more.  And we describe this in terms you already understand.
Here’s an example for you right now.   Have you ever wondered what the New York Stock Exchange is?  You hear it mentioned in the news all the time.  And you probably know it has something to do with stocks.  But what is it?
Well, you know what an auction is, right?  And that is all the New York Stock Exchange is.  It’s just an auction.  It’s where you will buy many of your stocks.  See there.  You already have a clue about stock exchanges.  Because we introduced the idea with something you already understand.  An auction.
And we did it in one sentence – “It’s just an auction.”  Because we wrote the right sentence.  We thought about what you already know before we started explaining.  Then we built on that.  It takes skill and effort to write in this manner.  That’s why you haven’t run into it before.
Section 4 is called “What You Need To Get Started.”  You really only need one thing to get started.  And that’s a stock market account.  Just like you need a checking account to hold your money and do your banking, you need a stock market account to hold your stocks and do your investing.  See there, we did it again, didn’t we.  We started with something you know – a checking account.  And then we related it to a stock market account.
We’ll tell you how you can open a stock market account.  And once you’ve done this, you’re one click away from getting started.  You can open your stock market account with a single phone call to a broker.  And they will be happy to help you set it up.  And I’ll even tell you which online broker I have used successfully for years.
Here’s the other good news.  You only need to do this once.  Then you’re good to go.
Section 5 is called “How To Pick Good Stocks.”  Okay, now that you have an account, you will want to invest in your stocks.  But which stocks should you buy?   Here’s the good news.  You don’t really need to do all kinds of complicated analysis if you don’t want to.  Because there are many great sources for stock recommendations.
We’ll show you a number of these sources.  Some are free.  And some are newsletters that cost a modest amount of money.  I think you will be surprised at how modest the subscription prices are for some of them.
I subscribe to them today.  And I even subscribed to them when I was a financial consultant and stockbroker licensed with the New York Stock Exchange.  As a stockbroker, you can imagine how many resources I had available to me.   But I still used the resources I show you in this book.  I’ll give you the names of a couple of them, and where you can sign up if you want to go that route.
Then in Section 6 we get into “How To Buy And Sell Stocks.”  The steps to buy and sell are similar.  We’ll start by walking you through how to buy your first stock.  And with your new online account you can do this in seconds, with the click of a mouse.
And like magic, someone, somewhere in the world, will sell you that stock.  Similarly, you can sell it in seconds if you decide to.  How good is that?  Compare it to how long it takes, and difficult it is, to sell a house (weeks, months, years), for example.  You can typically sell a stock in seconds.  And we’ll walk you through that too.
Section 7 is called “Protecting Your Stock Investments.”  This is mainly about when to sell.  And it is the hardest question in investing.  Not knowing when to sell causes people to take big losses in the stock market.  Perhaps you have experienced this as well.  But do you know that there is a simple technique that will keep you from having big losses?  If you do this, you will be way ahead of most investors.
It’s a simple, effective and important technique.  We use it because, historically, over time, the stock market tends to go up, and your wealth increases.  But it doesn’t go up in a straight line.  Sometimes the market and stocks go down for a while.  Like the investors and employees at ENRON experienced.  Had they used this one technique, and another one we show you as well, they would not have suffered catastrophic losses where most of them got completely wiped out!
But you can protect against this.  And we’ll show you how.
So Who Am I And Why Should You Listen To Me?
So who am I and how can I help you with stock investing?  Well, the short answer is I’m a former financial consultant and stockbroker licensed with the New York Stock Exchange.  And I actually made money following the crash of 2008.
You remember the crash of 2008, right?  The housing bubble went bust, the stock market came unglued, and millions of investors watched in horror as their stocks plummeted — and their hopes and dreams went up in smoke.  Looking at a key market index of that period, stocks fell a whopping 38%.  But many investors did far worse, losing half or more of their money.
Virtually everyone was affected, and I’m not here to tell you I ran the 2008 gauntlet unscathed.
But by 2008 I was far different than the average stock investor.  The crash of 2008 presented incredible opportunities for those who knew how to seize them.  So it was during those dark days that I made some of my best investments ever, and ultimately increased the value of my portfolio by 2 1/2 times.
But that was a far cry from how I started.
I started out knowing nothing.  As a young man, I often wondered how people made money investing, and how the stock market worked.  Decades ago, before calculators were even invented, I recall sitting down one night in my one bedroom apartment.  And with pencil and paper, I manually calculated interest on my meager savings account, to see how long it would take to build wealth.  And the answer was that I simply couldn’t do it that way.
I was disappointed, and puzzled.  How did some people grow so much wealth?
Slowly, the answer came to me.  And it was that stock investing was a big part of the answer.  So I began investing in a stock.  But my first investment wasn’t so great.   It did well at first, but then I watched helplessly as my stock portfolio, consisting of just one stock, dwindled in front of my eyes.  And although the solutions are obvious to me today, I wouldn’t have known much what to do back then, even if I’d tried.
Does this story have a familiar sound to you?  I was, perhaps, an investor just like you.
Years later I became a financial consultant and licensed stock broker working for a large broker dealer in the US.  And through much research, study, trial and error, I began to understand the answer to my basic question.
And if I could do that, starting from such a humble beginning, and making so many mistakes, you can too.
So let’s look at how the stock market can increase your wealth.  Let’s get to the basic question.  And that is, “Why invest in stocks?”

To learn more, go to https://www.amazon.com/Stock-Investing-Beginners-First-Money-ebook/dp/B06XQWDNXD/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492513089&sr=8-1&keywords=stock+investing+for+beginners+by+john+roberts.