How does a regular person invest in the stock market?

Mark Cuban did it. I want to make big money off investments. How do I do it. I dont have a lot of money. I am just a single mother trying to make it .

As a single mother with limited income and no prior experience, you do not want to go out and buy individual shares. You will almost certainly lose your money.

If you have at least $1000 to invest, open a ROTH IRA at Vanguard (http://www.vanguard.com) and buy their STAR fund. This will give you an excellent spread of risk, and will over time make you money.

If you have less than that, open an online trading account (like e*Trade) and buy ETFs. I suggest one that tracks the Total Stock Market to begin with. Vanguard have these too, but you can buy various ETFs.

Open an account at some discount broker like Scottrade and place your bets. You can make trades online and everything.

It would be a good idea to invest with 'pretend money' for a while until you feel like you have an idea what you're doing.

Investing is gambling, don't kid yourself. Rich people can make money doing it because they can afford to bet the huge amounts of cash it takes to make money on low risk bets with low returns.

Starting with a small amount of money means you have to try for higher returns to get anywhere, which generally means taking more risk. If you aren't going to be extremely careful you might as well take your cash to the casino, or just give it away and eliminate the middleman.

Generally I don't think anyone should bet money they can't afford to lose, or worse borrow money to bet on stocks.

a regular person invests in the stock market by putting money in a mutual fund, this lets a professional manage the money for them, either that or risk it all like in a casino like the last person said

Actually Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur not an investor, he founded the company Broadcast.com and very slyly sold it to Yahoo for about 6 billion just before the dot.com bubble burst. Luckily he was able to diversify much of his money and still has a net worth of around two and a half billion but that doesn't say much for his investment savvy. If your question could be that easily answered then everyone would be a millionaire. I can give you this advice. Make sure you are debt free before you invest and your first investment vehicle should be via your 401k. If you are not maxing that out you should not consider investing anywhere else. If you are maxing out the 401 the next step is funding your IRA. Both of these are tax deferred so you save a bundle in taxes plus most companies will provide a percentage match which will beat any investment. If you have money left after that you can use any of the low cost on-line brokers to invest (e-trade,Ameritrade, Schwab) etc, etc. As a novice you should diversify as much as possible in all these investment vehicles. Once you have a significant portfolio you should get a financial planner. Unfortunately there is no get rich quick scheme and if someone tells you there is you are probably the schema and they are the ones getting rich. Time and consistency is the key to building wealth. It's called dollar cost averaging and this is the perfect time to start as the market is down.

Sweetie, as a "single mother just trying to make it", stay away from the stock market until you've taken college finance courses and read at least 8 books on the subject of investing.
There are just too many predators in the market just waiting to tell you what to invest in so they can take your money. There is no guaranteed fast money; only a guarantee that the naive and uninitiated will get eaten alive.

Cuban diod it with his sales and purchases of the Mavericks team and turned those wimps into winners. My best advice for you is for you to put what you can into an online savings bank account I use ING but wamu, emigrantdirect etc are just as good. This will accumlate interest for you and teach you to put money in reserve with automatic depositis.

As for scottrade they stiffed me on a sell order and I lost $85 with them when it kept going down and pulling my money out of there next week. I don't recommend them now.

Start small then work your way into the market you need at least 2,000 to make any kind of decent purchases.

John P's advice is absolutely correct; reading 8 books on investing, listening to Bob Brinker and Clark Howard might change your view on investing. And starting a business comes through hard-work, determination, and an excellent idea that can be marketed profitably to customers.

If you don't like reading and especially stuff like earnings and sales, then individual stocks are not for you.
Almost no one gets rich real quick. It takes a life time.
You may try no load mutual funds. And I mean no load (no sales commission). You Will have to do some reading. Once a year Forbes and Kipplinger's comes out with their mutual fund rating.
If you're just starting out sometimes the initial money they want is more than you might have. There may be more but the only mutual fund I know of that will let you start with $50- is
T Rowe Price. You have to have a checking account where they will take money from you once a month(min=$50). You set the amount.
So a no-load mutual fund is one way to invest.
Ten different people will give you 10 different ideas of where to place your money, hope I helped a little.

Zecco is FREE.