With a share dealing account, you can: Place orders to buy and sell shares. Monitor your portfolio. You’ll be able to view all your holdings and your profit and loss figures. Access investment tools and research. Most platforms today offer some form of research, along with investment tools such as financial data and charts to help you make investment decisions. However, research and tools vary, depending on the provider. Buying and selling shares through a share dealing account is typically quite straightforward. Every share dealing platform is slightly different, however. To buy and sell shares, you will first need to fund your account. This can usually be done online through a card payment. Once your account is funded, you will have the ability to place trades. Note that shares can only be bought and sold when the stock market is open. For UK shares, this is between 8:00am and 4:30pm. Overseas markets have different trading hours. With most platforms, you simply search for the company that you would like to buy shares in (e.g. Lloyds Bank, BP, Amazon, Apple, etc.) and click through to its page. Here, you’ll receive a quote for the stock. Then, it’s a matter of entering the trade details, such as the number of shares you want to buy, and confirming the trade. Once the deal is completed, you’ll receive a contract note with all the details of the trade. For example, let’s say you want to buy Lloyds Bank shares through Hargreaves Lansdown. The first step is to search for Lloyds Bank and then click through to its page. Then, you hit ‘deal’ and enter the trade details. Once you have entered the trade details, you click on ‘Place a deal’.