I have been investing for roughly the last 6 months or so out of college. I would have made a good amount of money if I made a few more riskier trades, but I have been mostly playing it safe. So far I've made around 7k or so give or take with some of it being bigger trades than others.

I've made more in some etfs, but haven't cashed them out yet. I have mostly been actively monitoring them with many of them being relatively good single stock investments. I am currently waiting for the market to go down to finally start making mutual fund and maybe some etf purchases at the moment.

So I think I will help you get started a bit.

First a few quick questions you should ask yourself and reply as a comment here if you have time (My responses are in brackets just for some dialogue on it.):

1.How much do you think you should invest in a single stock as a %. What about a % for an etf? or % a mutual fund? (You should remember cash is king for being a personal investor, as you are not a mutual fund who has to meet certain wins you should play things somewhat safe for starting out)

2.How much time do you have to spend watching the market? (It is important to watch the market at least a few minutes a day whether it be by phone or by tv or just looking up at least what the market is at and some of your holdings)

3.What news items(twitter, finviz, morningstar etc) do you think are important for trading? (personally I like finviz, morningstar, and seeking alpha. Although it is important to note that most investing advice is just opinions and not all fact checked in every case. Twitter is a horrible idea for sentiment analysis because anyone can say anything out of context in only 140 characters, but seeking alpha is a decent amount of sentiment with some structured information about the well-being of the investor's mindset with some backed information in most cases.)

4.What market data should determine your trading? (What metrics do you think you should pay attention to? What level of risk seems worthwhile?)

5.Do you prefer an active concentrated approach to investing or a more diversified approach? (even warren buffet makes most of his money on 5-6 stocks but owns tons for diversification, but you are more likely to buy indexes or etfs for diversification as an individual)

6.Should you buy/sell on your own or are you better off using etfs and mutual funds some of which are index funds? (Most people do a bit of both but buying mutual funds or etfs are longer investments than daytrading stocks. You can save yourself a bit of trouble by using bogleheads passive investing portfolio to pick mutual funds: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios )

7.What are some criteria or timing events you can think of that would be a good time to buy a stock? (This is important because it shows risk timing.)

8. Should you concentrate in one sector of stocks? (This can work if you really know a lot about that sector, but it is rare. I have been fairly successful with trading mostly tech and some biotech lately but tech is still very risky)

9. How long should you hold a stock for? Do you ride it to what % of loss? When do you know when to cutt loses and move money elsewhere or take winnings and cash out? (This greatly depends on the stock of course, but I think the answer is basically you should in most cases be ok with looking at trends of the stock's day range. If it breaks below it's normal day trading range it may be very bad news and you should consider selling it. If your stock goes up think about it as will it do better next quarter by beating earnings. And what about the general market as well?)

As for actual trading brokers in my opinion there are 3 good ones: fidelity(has the most safety/trust for your money), vanguard(has the best mutual funds with cheapable/do-able expenses with great returns), and schwab(very beginner invester friendly, and I plan to join them when I will pick up trading more).