I don't know why you haven't got an answer to this.....maybe because
it's too much like giving financial advice which tends to be heavily
regulated. I've spent a lot of time in the financial services
industry but I'm British and I've never bought US stock as a US
resident on my own account, so the comments below are just based on a
quick bit of googling. There is a fantastic amount of info on stocks
on the web - the problem is to sort out the useful stuff - maybe $10
isn't enough to tempt anyone to do this for you.
One good place to start seems to be http://finance.yahoo.com/. You
can use Symbol Lookup to find the stock-ticker symbol for your stocks
eg Google ordinary stock is GOOG. (You need to be careful to get the
right stock because many companies will have a range of different
share classes and bonds quoted - for instance, Google is
straightforward, there are a number of results for Rogers, and I can't
decode your throd choice at all (are you sure it has
publicly-available stock?. It would be only too easy to buy the wrong
security - I have known this happen to professional fund managers, let
alone individuals just starting out).
Armed with your code you can Google for more research. There doesn't
seem to be a lot on yahoo itself though I only had a quick look.
Yahoo also gives you a click-through to a number of online brokers eg
Ameritrade and Schwab (just above the bit about currency rates on the
LHS). A broker is who you need to buy stock through. In the UK, you
can usually go up to the counter of your bank and do the transaction
through them (the broker owned by the bank, in fact, but all
communication through the bank staff) but I don't know about the US.
I don't know about your credit question in the US either. You could
learn a lot by following the links to set up accounts with some of the
on-line brokers and see what info they ask you for. Within reason,
the choice of broker probably doesn't matter too much because the
price they get you is regulated and the fee they charge you is subject
to competition. However, if you are very price-sensitive you should
shop around.
Anyhow, the brokerage fees are much less important to your financial
well-being than the decision to buy stock in the first place.
Presumably you have reasons for wishing to buy stock direct rather
than invest in a wider range through a mutual fund (for instance) but
of course you would be putting all yout investment eggs in one (or
maybe three) basket(s) - or as they say in the trade, your portfolio
would not be diversified. Apologies if all this is old hat, but I
sort of assumed that if it was, you wouldn't be asking q's on google
about it.
And one last point - your title is "stock options" I assume from the
text you intend that to mean something like "what are my options if I
want to buy stock". However, the phrase "stock options" normally
refers to a financial instrument in its own right which gives you the
right but not the obligation to purchase or sell an underlying
security at some point in the future. |
