What does it take to buy and sell shares/stocks?
You need money. To purchase shares, you can either use a broker or participate in direct purchase plans (most major companies will have these types of plans where you can purchase directly from the company instead of buying from the secondary markets). To sell, you will need a broker, as sales are done on the secondary market. A broker is a person that has been granted permission to execute buy/sell orders on a specific exchange. Most retail and discount brokers in the US will be able to trade on all of the public exchanges and will typically also be an agent for OTC platforms (such as Pink Sheets and OTCBB) as well. As you are asking about the very basics of the market, you need to get a lot more education before you attempt to enter the market. The easiest way to loose all your money in the stock market is by not knowing what you are really doing. Reviewing the archived answers to this Yahoo Answers group is a good place to start learning about the markets. The SEC has very good inve
