I am a student interested in the stock market with zero idea of how it works. Where should I start?

Even I started my stock market journey when I was at College. I had completely no idea how it works. When I wanted to learn about markets in 2007, there was no Zerodha Varsity, no Quora, not much trading forums and I didn’t know any friends or family members who trades in Stock market. So I had no clue where should i start.

I use to travel to my college every day through local bus and it takes 30 minutes to reach my college, one day I was waiting at bus stop, there was this newspaper shop, I just went ahead and bought The Economic Times newspaper.

That’s it. I started reading it, didnt understand 80% of the news initially. But I kept reading it on daily basis in the bus and by the time i reach my college i would have completed reading the paper, whatever I didn’t understand,kept a note of it and started googling about it once i reach home(no smartphones, as i only had Nokia 1100 at that time).

Days passed, I started understanding the news, and after some googling i realized all i need is a Demat account to start trading. Applied for a PAN card and opened my Demat account with Sharekhan(no other option i had,no concept of discount brokers at that time) and started trading. All I know was just buy some shares that i read about in news paper and hold it for few days and sell it. Remember it was around Sept 2007, Indian Markets were so crazy, all crap stocks , whatever you buy will tend to go up.

Days passed, markets tanked, just like any beginner started losing more and more money. Later put in more efforts to gain more knowledge. Good thing was I din’t wait for any guidance, I did not keep on looking for resources, I just started right away opening an account, started trading with small funds and learnt on real time basis.

If you are beginner with Zero knowledge, just follow the below simple process.

1. Start with Varsity by Zerodha — All things stock markets simplified — Markets, Trading, and Investing Simplified. All basics are covered here. Read all the topics here, from not knowing anything, you will get into the phase of knowing something.
2. Once you learn basics, immediately open a brokerage account with Zerodha or Fyers or RKSV with any discount brokers with minimum capital that you can afford to lose. Remember no matter what, whatever your investments are, you are gonna blow your account. So if you have 50k trading capital, just start with 1/10 th of it, just start with Rs.5000.
3. Do not indulge in paper trading and waste your time, Trading is all about emotions, only when your money is involved you will truly understand about markets.
4. Give more importance to Technical Analysis, one of the best resource to learn about Technical analysis is through NCFM modules. You can download the work book from here.
5. You can also try Learn How to Trade the Markets which teaches you all basics of technical analysis in laymen terms.
6. Once you complete reading technical analysis module you can, develop your own rules for trading/investing. When to buy, when to sell, which shares to buy, how many shares to buy, what should be your stop loss.
7. Start the battle, blow up your little accounts, repeat.
8. Soon you will understand how it all works.

As a beginner one of the book that i really loved reading was

You dont even need to understand all jargon about stock market to read this book, its so simple and easy to understand where i ended up reading it in one go.

This is more than enough to get started in Stock Market.

Please check my Quora profile Kirubakaran Rajendran for links to other important answers that I have shared related to stock market.

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