Here are a few ideas that should help you get started.

If your company has a 401K plan, start funding that right away. If your company matches your contribution, it would be a 100% instant return on your investment and there is nothing out there that can match those returns. You will then have to pick from a bunch of mutual funds in that 401K plan to invest your contributions. If your company does not offer a 401K or you are not eligible, you can set up a personal retirement account called a Roth IRA and fund it with upto $4,000 a year. To learn more about the Roth IRA and a traditional IRA, check out a couple of articles about them in the "Articles" section of SINLetter.com. You can set up an IRA (Roth or traditional) through a broker like Ameritrade, Etrade, Fidelity or Vanguard.

Before you start investing make sure that you have at least 3 to 6 months of living expenses in cash. This way if you have an emergency you will not have to sell your investments at an inopportune moment. You can put this emergency money into a money market account or one of those online checking accounts that pay upwards of 4% in interest. I use ING Direct for this purpose and am happy with their 4.5% annual interest (as of 5/5/2007). You might also be able to find other accounts (Citibank, HSBC) that pay a higher rate of interest.

Once you have this in place, you could set up an account at one of the discount brokers (Tradeking, Etrade, Ameritrade, Scottrade) or a free broker (Zecco, Bank of America, Wells Fargo) to start creating your portfolio. Bank of America and Wells Fargo require you to have a balance of $25,000 (across accounts) to give you free trades. I personally use Ameritrade Izone and am very happy with their $5 commissions. About $5,000 to $10,000 is a good starting amount but you could also start with $2,000 and add to it monthly or quarterly. The key is to trade less so that brokerage commissions (which can add up very quickly) do not eat into your returns.

To learn the basics of investing, check out this Investing 101 tutorial on SmartMoney.com. It is the best online tutorial I found about the basics.

http://www.smartmoney.com/university/Investing101/?nav=dropTab

After you get a hang of the basics, check out this book by Peter Lynch, a legendary mutual fund manager who consistently made almost 30% a year for his investors. The book is easy to read and discusses many strategies.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743200403/qid=1127713478/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-3898871-3849504?v=glance&s=books

Start out investing very slowly and consider any losses in the beginning as nothing more than paying "tuition" to the market so that you can learn from your mistakes and become a better investor. Diversification is very important and should help you weather market drops much better than a portfolio consisting of very few concentrated investments. By diversification I mean diversification across sectors (healthcare, technology, transportation) in stocks as well as diversification across asset classes such as gold, bonds, stocks and real estate.

If you have any questions post them as a response to this topic and good luck.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. — William Blake.

Yes, I am blogging @ http://www.sinletter.com/ablog.aspx