Stock Market Today

You may buy one stock at a time (I assume you mean one company’s shares versus 1 share of stock which can be done, but is not economical since you will get charged a commission). Depending on how often you plan to invest, it may not be wise to buy just one company’s shares at a time. The key to successful investment over time is diversification, which means spreading your investments among multiples companies preferably in different industries. Unless you plan on ramping up your portfolio quickly (say buying 8 different companies’ shares in the next 12 – 18 months), you might be better off with a mutual fund. A mutual fund takes your money and other peoples’ money,pools it together and buys a diversified portfolio of stock, which is what you want. Although they charge fees, you get professional managers looking out for you. If you go that route (mutual fund), look for what is called a “no-load” fund – these funds have much lower fees (and usually nothing up front) than do “load” funds.

You can add to you investment at any time (just by sending the managing company more money), you can track your fund values in the newspaper or online (each fund has a daily NAV or Value – multiply the NAV by the number of fund shares you own and that is what your investment is worth), and different funds invest in different areas (some invest heavily in tech stocks, others in income stocks, some in bonds, some in small cap [small companies], etc.).