Anyone that wants to learn the stock market needs to have a place where they can buy and sell their stocks. Easy right? Well, maybe not when you consider how many possible ways you can buy stocks online or offline.
In the old days the only choice to buy stocks and bonds was with what is called a full service broker. Remember those EF Hutton ads? There was no buying stocks online because there was no online!
Just to get a stock quote you had to call the broker and they either had a teletype machine that would give quotes that were delayed around 20 minutes or so or they had to call their floor traders and get a quote for you.
These full service brokers charged very high commissions (this was before the discount stock brokers became popular) and usually tried to sway you towards the stocks that the brokerage firm either thought were good issues or what they had in their inventory and had to unload.
You could easily pay $50 to $100 or even more on a 100 share round lot of a stock depending on the stock’s price. Sometimes the broker would knock a few bucks off if you were a regular but you still ended up paying an outrageous amount in commissions.
Good brokers back then earned tons of money and really had a pretty nice thing going for them until the discount stock brokers came into existence.
These discount brokers would charge fixed fees or a few cents a share and you could easily buy stock for $10 a trade. Firms like Scottrade, Charles Schwab and Fidelity are examples of what the modern day discount brokers look like and many of these discount brokers can be a called a true online stock broker with the many benefits of a full service stock broker like company research while giving you an online stock market trading platform where you can buy and sell stocks in real-time.
Active traders usually look for even bigger discounts and some of the best online stock trading deep discount brokers like Interactive Brokers charge 1 penny or less per share depending on your lot size. They have a $1 minimum so if you buy anything less than 100 shares you pay a buck.
How’s that for trading stocks online cheap! I use IB for many trades and it is amazing how cheap the trade commissions are.
One thing you need to be aware of with online stock market trading using a deep discount broker is the learning curve of their trading platform.
Every online stock broker has their own software for trading stocks online and you need to spend some time learning the trading software before you actually make any real online stock trades.
Even when you are comfortable with the online trading software you can make mistakes. Several times I have accidentally bought a stock or bought more shares of a stock online because of keying errors. A few seconds and a few hundred dollars loss soon teaches you to be very careful when entering your online stock orders. 
TradeStation is another good tool for online stocks trading as it allows you to write trading systems and do extensive backtesting, etc. and the trading platform is very nice but Tradestation charges about $100 bucks a month depending on your account options unless you have a large account balance or are a very active online stock trader while Interactive Brokers provides a free online stock trading platform.
So today your options for buying stock online are so vast that it really isn’t that easy picking an online stock broker so you can trade stocks online whenever you want.
There are many discount and deep discount online stock brokers to choose from and most of them are pretty good but like anything else related to trading stocks online you need to do some research.
I have the firms I like for buying stocks online but they might not be right for your online stock market trading so the best thing to do is look for reviews of any online stock broker you are thinking about using in your online trading.
Reviews from actual customers are a great way to learn the good and the bad about a particular online broker but be sure the reviews are real and not fakes put up the firm itself. If you are investigating better known online brokers the odds are that the reviews will be real.
A major factor to consider when choosing a broker for buying stocks online is the stability of the online trading platform. If it is constantly down or has data issues that can cost you big money in your online stock trading business. You absolutely need to get this one right or you will be very frustrated when you are trying to make an online stock trade and you can’t log into your account or stand-alone trading application.
Most online stock trading firms do have 800 numbers you can for trading but the commissions on these can be fairly high compared to doing it yourself online.
You also want to be sure that the online stock trading companies you are looking at are solvent and that they have ample protection for your account(s). You don’t want to wake one day to find that your online trading brokerage went out of business and you didn’t have adequate account protection.
Once again, most of the “name” online stock brokerages will have more than enough account insurance to cover most people’s online stock trading accounts.
In summary, buying stocks online is so much easier than using a full service broker and cheaper too! Just make sure you do your due diligence before you open an account and take the time to learn the terms of service and how the online trading system works and you will be fine.
Good luck in your online stock market trading and I hope you are profitable!
