Shares; are they really only for the rich/investors?
Small purchases will have a disproportionate expense for commissions. Even a $5 trade fee is 5% on a $100 purchase. So on one hand, it's common to advise individuals just starting out to use mutual funds, specifically index funds with low fees. On the flip side, holding stocks has no annual fee, and if you are buying for the long term, you may still be better off with an eye toward cost, and learn over time.  In theory, an individual stands a better chance to beat the experts for a number of reasons, no shareholders to answer to, and the ability to purchase without any disclosure, among them. In reality, most investor lag the average by such a wide margin, they'd be best off indexing and staying in for the long term. A guy I used to work with would buy some shares in certain companies on a regular basis.  The guy in question chose Coke, Pepsi, GE, Disney and some other old stable stocks.  He just kept buying a few shared ($50 or so at a time) year after year after year.  He worked his entire life, but by the time he was ready to retire, he had a pretty sizable investment; he was worth a rather tidy sum. The moral of the story is, it is very much worth it to invest a bit at a time.  Don't bother with the idea of buying low and selling high; not right now.  Just go ahead and buy stable stocks (or shares of index funds) and wait them out.  This strategy (mixed with other retirement tactics like a 401K from work, and IRA of your own, Social Security in the US) is a good way to build wealth. Don't spend money you don't have, be ready for a long term investment and I think it makes great sense, regardless of what country you live in. I think small sums invested regularly over long-term can do good for you, things to consider:  I would go with an index fund and contribute there there regularly. I think I have a better answer for this since I have been an investor in the stock markets since a decade and most of my money is either made through investing or trading the financial markets. Yes you can start investing with as low as 50 GBP or even less. If you are talking about stocks there is no restriction on the amount of shares you can purchase the price of which can be as low as a penny. I stared investing in stocks when I was 18. With the money saved from my pocket money which was not much. But I made investments on a regular period no matter how less I could but I would make regular investments on a long term. Remember one thing, never trade stock markets always invest in it on a long term. The stock markets will give you the best return on a long term as shown on the graph below and will also save you money on commission the broker charge on every transaction. The brokers to make money for themselves will ask you to trade stocks on short term but stock market were always made to invest on a long term as Warren Buffet rightly says. And if you want to trade try commodities or forex. Forex brokers will offer you accounts with as low as 25 USD with no commissions. The commission here are all inclusive in spreads.  Is this true? Can the average Joe become involved? Yes anyone who wants has an interest in the financial markets can get involved. Knowledge is the key not money. Is it worth investing £50 here and there? Or is that a laughable idea? 50 GBP is a lot. I started with a few Indian Rupees. If people laugh let them laugh. Only morons who don't understand the true concept of financial markets laugh. There are fees/rules involved, is it worth the effort if you just want to see? The problem with today's generation of people is that they fear a lot. Unless you crawl you dont walk. Unless you try something you dont learn. The only difference between a successful person and a not successful person is his ability to try, fail/fall, get back on feet, again try untill he succeeds. I know its not instant money, but I'd like to get a few shares here and there, to follow the news and see how companies do. I hear that BRIC (brasil, russia, india and china) is a good share to invest in Brazil India the good thing is share prices are relatively low even the commissions. Mostly ROI (return on investment) on a long term would almost be the same. Can anyone share their experiences? (maybe best for community wiki?) Always up for sharing. Please ask questions no matter how stupid they are. I love people who ask for when I started I asked and people were generous enough to answer and so would I be. "Shares are for investors. Most of the rich are investors. Unfortunately, the reverse is not true. But if you want to get rich, the first step is to become an investor. (The second is to become a SUCCESSFUL investor. 50 pounds might be too little. Try to start with at least 500 at a time. You can ADD amounts of 50 pounds. There are definitely fees involved. You will ""pay for lessons."" But it will be worth it, if you become even a moderately successful investor. As for rules, they'll teach you the rules. Everyone wants your business. People have gotten (modestly) rich, buying shares here and there. One man told me of investing $600 in a company called Limited, and ending up with $12,000 some years later. BRIC is not a ""share."" It is an acronym for four countries ""of the future."" High risk, high reward here." Put £50 away as often as possible, and once it's built up to £500, invest in a stockmarket ETF. Repeat until you retire. As a matter of fact, I invest small sums in stable stocks every month (in fact, much lesser than the $50 you are talking about). More than the return on investment, I gained a lot of knowledge keeping track of my stocks and this now helps me pick my stocks better. And the portfolio is doing great too. So, it is a good idea to start small and invest regularly.
"When you buy a share of stock, you are almost always buying from someone who previously purchased that share and now wants to sell it. The money -- minus broker's fee -- goes to that other investor, which may be a person, a company (rarely the company that issued the stock, but that will occasionally be the case), an investment fund, the ""market maker"" for that stock (websearch for definition of that term), or anyone else. They owned a small percentage of the company; you bought it from them and gave them the money for it, just as you would buy anything else. You don't know or care who you bought from; they don't know or care who they sold to; the market just found a buyer and seller who could agree on the price. There are a very few exceptions to that. The company may repurchase some of its own shares and/or sell them again, depending on its own financial needs and obligations. For example, my own employer has to purchase its own shares periodically so it has enough on hand to sell to employees at a slight discount  through the Employee Stock Ownership Program. But you generally don't know that's who you're selling to; it happens like any other transaction. And during the Initial Public Offering, if you're lucky/privileged enough to get in on the first wave of purchases, you're buying from the investment bank that's managing this process ... though that's an almost vanishingly rare case for ""retail"" investors like us; we're more likely to get the shares after someone has already pushed the price up a bit. But really, when you buy a share the money goes to whoever you bought it from, and that's all you can know or need to know." "Give me your money. I will invest it as I see fit. A year later I will return the capital to you, plus half of any profits or losses. This means that if your capital under my management ends up turning a profit, I will keep half of those profits, but if I lose you money, I will cover half those losses. Think about incentives. If you wanted an investment where your losses were only half as bad, but your gains were only half as good, then you could just invest half your assets in a risk-free investment. So if you want this hypothetical instrument because you want a different risk profile, you don't actually need anything new to get it. And what does the fund manager get out of this arrangement? She doesn't get anything you don't: she just gets half your gains, most of which she needs to set aside to be able to pay half your losses. The discrepancy between the gains and losses she gets to keep, which is exactly equal to your gain or loss. She could just invest her own money to get the same thing. But wait -- the fund manager didn't need to provide any capital. She got to play with your money (for free!) and keep half the profits. Not a bad deal, for her, perhaps... Here's the problem: No one cares about your thousands of dollars. The costs of dealing with you: accounting for your share, talking to you on the phone, legal expenses when you get angry, the paperwork when you need to make a withdrawal for some dental work, mailing statements and so on will exceed the returns that could be earned with your thousands of dollars. And then the SEC would probably get involved with all kinds of regulations so you, with your humble means and limited experience, isn't constantly getting screwed over by the big fund. Complying with the SEC is going to cost the fund manager something. The fund manager would have to charge a small ""administrative fee"" to make it worthwhile.  And that's called a mutual fund. But if you have millions of free capital willing to give out, people take notice. Is there an instrument where a bunch of people give a manager capital for free, and then the investors and the manager share in the gains and losses? Yes, hedge funds! And this is why only the rich and powerful can participate in them: only they have enough capital to make this arrangement beneficial for the fund manager." Hmm... I'm sure setting up an entirely new market would be really easy and wouldn't be met by serious backlash from extremely rich enterprises that like the status quo.  /sarcasm  I picture that option even more monumental of a task than a small company trying to set up as a new ISP in a city where a large telecom has a majority.  It's nearly impossible thanks to all of the money that the large telecom can throw at maintaining its current market share. "The implication is market irrationality is stronger than market rationality. Aka nothing makes sense when TSLA climbs to $400 or when CMG rises to $750.   I wouldn't say there is a systematic flaw in valuation. I think there is just a lot of ignorance. Markets are more open to household investors than ever before. You used to go to your broker and ask him what's up and he'd give you the inside scoop since you pay them money. Now you go onto marketwatch and get some random nobody's opinion on everything and make stock selections based on that.   But eventually the chickens come home to roost and things will correct itself. Big players will jump ship and cause signals to other traders to jump ship. The public can pump stocks up pretty high but it doesn't just go to infinity. Eventually someone will stop and say, ""wtf is going on"" and start selling. Stocks are sold on a basis of a limit order book so it's real prices that people are paying. People don't care about prices currently because most don't have any finance knowledge but want to invest their own money.  They just hear about Tesla doing something amazing (from some clickbait article or news outlet) and can't stop thinking about buying Tesla. They go to Chipotle and think ""wow this place is so good and hip, they must be a great investment"".   The markets have been filled with more subjective analysis than ever before especially with so much low quality information at your fingertips. Equally ignorant people startin blogs about investment and personal finance being shepherds for other ignorant people. In the end they all lose.  People who exclaim ""this stock is going up to $250 easily"" with literally zero quantitative analysis or even a baseline reference point to back it up are prime examples of this.   Ignorance of markets and cheap money almost always lead to market runs that end catastrophically. Dot com bubble, 1929 market crash, 2008, it's always the same. People who have no business taking loans out or buying on margin or leveraging positions with debt only to get fucked over once things are brought back down to Earth. After 2 runs of QE, we now have cheap money and with everyone being a crier for their personal investment strategy, we now also have rampant ignorance.   I don't expect things to last but no one can call the bottom or the top, or else you'd be very very rich. Have a safe portfolio, don't try to time the markets. Have a strategy that hedges against unexpected change, don't try to gamble on this change. Because it's ultimately impossible to predict the movement of every single person on this earth that invests their money into markets. So don't try. Just be prepared.   ----  To expand further into valuation theory:  at the end of the day, people invest their money to make more money.  It's as simple as that.  If your money doesn't grow in an investment vehicle, it's ultimately a shit investment.  But no one values intrinsic value of a company's equity before they decide whether or not $380 for TSLA is a good/bad deal.  As a result, stocks can be pumped up way higher and people still see the gains on their stocks through capital gains fueled by other optimistic investors.   Non-zero sum goes both ways.  People can make shitloads of money on stock without an equitable loser--people can also lose shitloads on stock without any real winner emerging from the rubble.  When this bubble bursts, lots and lots of people will lose money on TSLA when people's expectations become rational and they stop paying $300 a share for a negative or 70 PE ratio.  It's insane what multipliers people will pay for these companies without even realizing the implication--if you buy a share of a company with a PE ratio of 70, you just paid 70 times their earnings for a share.  In an ideal world where they released every single penny of earnings as dividends, it would take you 70 periods to reclaim your money on that share.  This obviously doesn't take into account capital gains, but capital gains aren't supposed to be this irrational to where a stock can be pumped up into 70x PE ratio in the first place.  It's a whole messed up web of confusion and irrationality and eventually something will catalyze a reaction.  Imagine a market where everyone just agreed to pump up a single stock to infinity and everyone just rakes in shitloads of money.  Would this work?  Of course not.  It's literally a pyramid scheme that relies on future generations to constantly inject capital--no real value is being created by this scheme.  It requires constantly more future generations to continue adding money into the scheme and will crash once people stop pumping money into it.  The same thing will happen here.  Everyone ""agreed"" to pump up TSLA (in a sense) but eventually people will realize this is stupid as shit and the pyramid will come tumbling down because there is nothing they receive from this scheme other than the money from other people.  It's essentially moving money around, making 0 use of it, until people stop pumping money into the system and everyone realizes that nothing of real value had been produced through the use of this money.  Ultimately the only thing that creates real value is the money that is returned to shareholders from an outside party--the company you're invested in.  Real value is not created when people exchange stock and money.  So why do these transactions create higher values in equity?  The basis of equity valuation states that dividends are the only way for companies to raise the price of their stock, going off the traditional Dividend Discount Model.  And theoretically, that's the only logical explanation.  Buying and trading stock does nothing for the company, minus T Stock they might own.  Ultimately the only party creating real value is the underlying company.  If they aren't creating real value, then their stock should not be increasing, period.  The way they create value is by efficiently utilizing assets to generate returns on investment which can be returned to investors through dividends.  Dividends can only be increased (while maintaining an equitable payout ratio) by generating more net income that can increase the actual pool of money that can be allocated back to investors.  TSLA does not do this.  TSLA regularly loses money and overpromises.  There is no logical explanation for any of this except that everyone is irrational.    Obviously theory is not the same as in practice but the theory is important here because it's really the basis for any investment at all.  At the end of the day, a share of stock is the right to a share of the company's equity.  People own equity in companies because companies generate money that it returns back to its owners.  That's what a company does.  That's what an owner does.  If you own shares of a company, you're an owner.  And if your company does not return more money back to you YoY, then why are you invested in them?    Ultimately, you're riding a capital gains wave that will eventually subside once market irrationality succumbs to rationality.  And it always does because the real value always catches up to the fake value that is caused by pumping and dumping stocks." Are you claiming the powerful can predict the ups and downs of the economy well enough to consistently profit from it? Please show me these great investors that don't fail much; there must be quite a few, right? The rest of the market knows when the dividends are paid out, and that will be reflected naturally in the share price. That's why there is no way to consistently beat the market. Because the market is other human beings, who's sum of knowledge is greater than any individual. Everything in the stock market boils down to this in one way or another. Heh, not surprised.  Stock investing is very much like gambling to most people I've known, whether they admit it or not.  They invest by hunches on what will go up or down, or tips from their gardener, etc. You do realize that the stock market is at all time highs because of QE, right?   And that the article isn't even disputing that, it is saying that a vast majority of people is not getting into a better standard of living, with the exception of the very rich, which also happen to be the ones that hold most of the stocks. Funny how that works, isn't it.