Free stock software downloads and resources

The evidence suggest that Leeson (see Warren Buffet's bet) followed an old gambler's strategy of "just double your bet when you lose. This seems like a fool proof approach.

Think about tossing a coin, heads you get a dollar, tails you lose a dollar.

Not only is it foolish to go ahead and trust some mass-market stock market program that you can buy off the shelf, but Warren Buffet has bet that even if you use the best hedge funds in the world to do your investing, you're not going to do better than a cheap S&P 500 index (sold by
Vanguard ).

Warren Buffet, one of the richest and arguably greatest investors in the
world certainly knows what he's talking about. His style of investing is

Fakery occurs in all professions, plumbing, cars, lawyers, science, medicine, religion, and even athletics. But what accounts for the high degree of misinformation when in comes to investing? In some ways investment scams are similar to supplement scams that promise renewed vitality and a cure from everything from colds to cancer. Why are both investing and supplements so prone to so much snake oil? Because in both medicine and in investing:

1. Sometimes is seems to work, even though it often doesn't.
   
2. People are biased to believe things that are in their own self-interest.

You'll see advertisements for traders make 2% a day (or more!) using some system that someone is trying to get you to sign on to. Lets do the math on this. You start off with a dollar. If you make 2% a day for 10 years, and there are about 200 trading days a year that's 1.02 to the 2000 or so, or more the 1000 times the total GNP of the entire world! Do the people making that claim realize how idiotic that is? An average of 2% a day might not sound like much, but it's way more than is possible.

As time goes on, companies claiming to sell trading advice and provide tools for buying stocks are becoming more and more sophisticated in an effort to con increasingly wary investors.

There are different kind of stock market programs.

1. Ones for woefully ignorant individuals ready for a fall.
2. Ones such as on this site, that will help you to understand
   how to minimize risk in the stock market.

Unfortunately there are lots of people who buy stock market programs in the first category. By looking around at this site, you can see a lot of logical arguments for why you're wasting your time on this kind of nonsense.

Instead of diving into the deep end, wouldn't it be cool to buy and sell stocks and mutual funds in a virtual world, with virtual money, until you get really good at it. Once you're up to speed, you start trading for real! Sounds good? Sorry but this isn't going to help you. Stock & mutual fund simulation games won't apply to the real world.

You'd think that if a company is having layoffs, is not profitable, and is getting sued by competitors means that its stock will have to go down. So how can it be true that you can't predict it's future price, and how can it be true that it's as good an investment as a company doing well?

There are sites that give you a stock list of publicly traded companies. They're not all traded in the same way. There are many different stock exchanges. And stock exchanges in different countries. Even in the U.S. there are many different exchanges, for example the NYSE and NASDAQ.

Here are a few sites that have a list of stock companies and stock indices:

• investorguide.com

DON'T GET SCAMMED!

Are you looking for the "50 hottest stocks"? You're not going to be able to get any useful information from sites claiming to give you great returns from certain stocks. This is not the way investing works. The truth is that only an individual with some sort of insider information (for which using it and disseminating it is illegal) would have any idea about which stocks were going to go up or down.

Sorry but you've got to be very suspicious of people that say they can