Who is the Best Person to Advise You on How to Buy Stocks?

There is always a lot of disagreement between investment experts as to the best way to maximize your return on stock investments.
Many of these arguments play out in the popular media with so-called experts yelling at one another on the cable business channel - as though they had just left the stock market trading pits and forgotten to turn their personal voice volume down to acceptable levels.
Of course, this is all showmanship and designed to get you, the viewer, excited about buying into the market.
These people are salesmen, when it is all said and done.
For someone thinking about how to buy stocks that are safe, however, these experts' self-assuredness can sometimes be misleading.
And, of course, the last thing you want to do when you are learning how to buy stocks is to lose control in a fit of excitement.
So, when all of these experts are pitching one stock or another as the next greatest thing - and believe me, most of them are for companies with which you will be completely unfamiliar - what are you to do? As a general rule, it is a good idea to avoid getting too caught up in the excitement generated by any advisor on television.
In the first place, many of these people will have a vested interest in certain stocks doing well - usually because their company portfolio is heavily invested in the areas they extol (and many of these people will offer a brief, almost unnoticeable disclaimer to that effect - for the sake of ethics).
Figuring out how to buy stocks based on the advice of contradictory opinions presented on some television show is next to impossible.
When it comes to deciding how to buy stocks, you should always do your own research on any company before you blindly accept the claims of someone whom you have never met.
After all, if you listened to everything you heard these experts say on television, you would be switching the stocks in your portfolio every other week - or even more frequently.
When was the last time you saw one of these experts pick the same stock every night for even a month straight? And therein is revealed the first clue that your advisors would be better chosen closer to home, as the best evidence indicates that picking solid companies and holding them long term is a more consistent way to be successful in the market than bouncing from stock to stock.
In the end, you should always remember that if it feels like someone is pitching a product to you ...
they probably are.