Now, what does it mean for the economy in general? Basically the markets are telling us that they see dark times ahead.

As for moving your cash in to gold, there’s no real need to do that. Your cash will always be there. The only reason you’d want to move it in to gold is if you think that we are heading for inflation, which means the price of gold will go up (so if you buy gold, and it goes, when you exchange it back to dollars you’ll have more dollars).

But there’s no guarantee gold will go up.

So no need to panic if you don’t own stock, you can just ignore all this insanity.

But aren’t stocks all affected by individual factors; like maybe one stock is getting sued and that stock is going to drop. Even if you know the direction of the stock market, the stocks themselves are subject to a bunch of factors. So how does knowing the direction of any stock market, DOW, Nasdaq S&P help you at all?

First off, virtually every stock has a positive correlation with the market. On almost all stock information pages on the web, you will see something that says ‘beta’. If the beta is positive, that means the stock has a positive correlation to the market index. Almost all stocks have positive betas. That means that if someone told you the S&P was going up, your best bet on nearly every stock is that the individual stock is going up too (beta would give you the right guess on how much it is going up if you knew how much the index was going up).

Second, (and this is the key to diversification) if you own a decent size portfolio of 30 or 50 stocks balanced somewhat like the index all those individual factors wash out and you start getting something more and more like the index performance. That means that the index doesn’t help you that much on the individual stock level, but it will help a lot on the portfolio level.

Beyond that, all those indexes are highly correlated so if you told me that the Dow was going up would I like to own GOOG, the answer is sure even though Google is not part of the Dow.

In investing, there are rarely sure things but there are often decent correlations and high probability bets. Betting on individual stocks when you know that stocks collectively are going up is a high probability bet and you should take it.

Now knowing when the market is going up is a whole different issue…

Could anyone suggest me a good free online stock market simulator which has the ability to trade stocks not only in the U.S.companies but all over the world ?

WSS is the webs leading stock market simulator and Virtual trading games poratal.

‘real time trading’ and a very user friendly site where you can get news, analysis and free tutorials and you can learn all the basics there.

The people who buy these shares are the shareholders, and the term can refer to an individual or an organization.

The term stock market can also apply to all the stocks available for trading (as well as other securities), for example, when used in terms like "the stock market performed well today."

The stock market involves the trading of bonds, which is a debt security that stipulates that the issuer of the bonds holds the holders a debt. It is exactly like a loan, only that it is in the form of a security. These bonds are traded over-the-counter, which means they are traded directly between two parties. Thisis opposed to exchange trading or the trading that occurs on stock exchanges or future exchanges.

I am basically asking for a full guide on how to begin to invest into the stock market.

Stock Market Basics

The term stock market, as the name connotes, is a place where you can market or trade a company’s stock, which the corporation issues through shares in order to raise capital. Of course, capital is the cost that a company incurs in relation to producing its products and services.

The people who buy these shares are the shareholders, and the term can refer to an individual or an organization.

The term stock market can also apply to all the stocks available for trading (as well as other securities), for example, when used in terms like "the stock market performed well today."

The stock market involves the trading of bonds, which is a debt security that stipulates that the issuer of the bonds holds the holders a debt. It is exactly like a loan, only that it is in the form of a security. These bonds are traded over-the-counter, which means they are traded directly between two parties. Thisis opposed to exchange trading or the trading that occurs on stock exchanges or future exchanges.

Why haven’t the much ballyhooed reforms had any visible effect on the stock market? It’s still floating around were it was 6 months ago.

As a typical Democrat bill it was poorly thought out. It did nothing to design the reward to be related to the long term benefit of their actions. It also didn’t cause the masses to have greater faith in the future of the economy. The bill attempted to micro-manage a system most in the government have never functioned in.

Most entrepreneurs don’t make as much as their employees in the early days. The entrepreneur works longer hours & does jobs others won’t usually for less pay. They take more risk & are the last ones paid. They are responsible for ALL of the employees welfare. They hear all the complaints & few of the thank yous. The tax man wishes to castrate them, while the Left wish to guillotine them.

The asker should ask themselves do you feel like happy days are here again thanks to Obama’s leadership? What has he done to encourage wealth creation?

Each exchange has their own (minimum) listing requirements.

Here are the NYSE’s: http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/FINANCE/NewYorkStockExch.html

1. Investors Buying & Selling shares; how does the trading volume, here, of individual buys & sells affect a company’s stock price?

2. How can you tell how many people/investors are buying or selling a company’s stock in order to go long or short and put the odds in your favour – is there any specific technical analysis indicator that can tell you this, or what else can?

3. How does news affect stock prices?

1. Individual investors are really only a small percentage of the volume traded daily. Big money like financial institutions, and mutual funds represent most of the volume and therefore are the ones who have a chance to really affect the stock price.

2. Because volume is an indicator of the amount of shares traded, there will be equal buying and selling. I know you want to find out if the sentiment is leaning towards selling off or loading up, and I do not know another indicator than the stock’s price. If the volume is more than 150% of the average volume traded, then there is probably a reason someone is buying or selling, so watch the stock’s price to indicate whether they’re loading up or selling off.

3. News usually has a very large impact on the stock’s prices. The type of news is directly related to the movement in price. So if its bad news, the stock will likely fall, if its good news the stock will likely rise. The problem with making a decision on news alone is that the stock does not always move the way you expected because of news. If a company says they have had a great quarter with high earnings, the stock may not even rise if they expected to have an even better quarter with higher earnings.