I want to invest my money in the stock market. What's the best and safe way to start?

Suppose you could make one stock purchase and by it own shares in the top 100 companies, biggest in market capitalization (price of stock times the number of shares), on the New York Stock Exchange? Back in July this was regularly selling at $66 per share, but now costs about $74+. Are you interested?

The symbol is NY and it is an exchange traded fund (ETF) by Ishares.com. There are others like it: DIA (called diamonds) buys the Dow Jones Industrials index stocks; SPY (Spyder) buys the S&P500; DVY buys the top 100 dividend paying stocks in a Dow Jones index for them.

ETFs are an interesting way to buy a range of stocks easily. They can go down, but they can go up as well. Most ETFs are built because some pattern or grouping of shares do tend to go up. Check it out.

Don't misuse the word safe. In a bank you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power after taxes & inflation so that is not safe. Don't think having control over something & seeing the total amount go up means you are better off. it is all relative. 4% interest -25% tax vs 3.5% inflation means you lose. Open an account at schwab.com or wherever & get some Etfs (IAU,EFA,EWA); Close end investment cos (ADX PEO) & maybe a Reit (SNH) or 2 & see how the future goes. Invest - don't speculate or do nothing. Both mean you fail.

the best way to invest is over time. you should start putting $ into an indexed mutual fund, exchange traded fund or a good old low cost, <1.00% a year mutual fund.

Start with no-load, low cost mutual funds. If you know nothing about stock market sectors stick with an index fund.

Then you can educate yourself about the stock market and how it works. Only then should you start trading.

Investors Business Daily covers mutual funds and stocks and offers a wealth of information for any investor.

Your money is always at risk in the stock market. But historically, the stock market has outperformed all other investment options, including real estate. If you are interested in investing I would suggest a couple of things. First, read "The Little Book that Beats the Market" - this is a great short book that will teach you the fundamentals of value investing. Then check out http://www.top10traders.com - this is a free site that lets you create a portfolio of stocks with $100,000 in "play" money. Each day the site ranks the best performing portfolios, so you can see how your picks perform compared to other investors. You can also read posts on investing from the best traders, as well as share your own investing ideas. There is also a charting feature , so you can see how your portfolio performs compared to the S&P 500.

Here are this month's best traders:

http://www.top10traders.com/Top10Standin...

Good luck.

Mutual Funds. They are lower yields, but also lower risk than jsut randomly picking stocks to invest in