Evaluating Your Earnings Online

If you are investing online through a discount broker, it's important to take trading fees into account when calculating your gains. If you pay $10 per trade and invest $500 in a company, the stock will have to rise 2% just for you to break even. After you have calculated your overall gains, compare them to the return for the same time period of the S&P 500 Index. If your stock choices are earning less than this benchmark, consider getting out of stock picking and into an index fund that will guarantee you make the market average.

Delayed Online Stock Quotes

Don't rely on free online stock quotes for timely stock performance information. Unless you subscribe to a "live" stock quote service, the stock quotes you download during market hours are delayed by about 15 minutes or more. This can make a big difference if you're a day trader.

Stop Loss Orders

Use a stop-loss order to instruct your online investment broker to automatically sell your stock when it sinks to a certain price. The benefit of using a stop-loss order is that you can potentially lock in your earnings before a stock falls too far without having to watch the stock continuously. The downside is that if the stock drops drastically causing the stock to be automatically sold, you may not even get the price you placed the order for.

Opt for an Online Annual Report

Once you have bought your stocks, find out if you can choose to get your annual report online instead of by mail. You'll help the environment while saving money for the company.

Getting Stock Quotes Online

As fewer newspapers carry stock quotes, it becomes more and more important to get comfortable with online stock quotes. Search for stock quotes using either the name of the company or the company's ticker symbol. You'll get access to the last trading price, the total change in price from the day before, the P/E ratio, the range of prices for the last year and more. You'll also be able to view a chart showing the movement of the stock's price in various increments of time, from the last few hours to the last 5 years or more.

Managing Your Online Investments

Manage your online investments with your computer's money management software. Programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money allow you to download information from the Internet to your online portfolio. They calculate your return, adjusted to include the price you paid for your stocks. They can also provide you with stock performance charts and links to information about your individual holdings.

Online Day Trading

One online investing strategy that gets talked about a lot is day trading. Day trading is an investment strategy that requires you to analyze daily stock trends and buy and sell frequently in hopes of turning a daily profit. Although late night TV ads make day trading sound like a scientific process that can make anyone instantly rich, this is not the case. Day trading is an extremely risky investment strategy that can cost you a lot of money in trading fees, lost investments and a personal life. Instead of day trading, research several good stocks or mutual funds and pick a few that you believe will grow over a longer period of time. Invest in those and get off the computer so you can enjoy your other hobbies.