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The financial markets are 100% a scam, like tax-advantaged retirement plans are entirely to make your average joe align their interests with the stock market and then use their own money against them. Take advantage of them since they're free money if offered, but on average they're not going to make you rich. Invest in making your labor more valuable to capitalists, as that's going to be your best ROI until you've got a job where you're not living paycheck-to-paycheck.

You’d be infinitely better off learning to code in SQL and watching a few videos on how to do basic statistics equations in excel or R. Which sounds intimidating but honestly it’s the far easier side of being tech competent, self-taught within 2-3 months. Starting salary for a data analyst (usually only requires a bachelors and those skills) is around $70k. There’s also a ton of data entry jobs out there that pay shit but are at least work from home and get you familiar with data usage.

Either way I would strongly advise against trying to get into investing if you’re already strapped for cash. That’s a great way to get even deeper in the hole. Investing without institutional backing is sincerely just gambling

If nobody can convince you to not go this route at the very least, stay away from the apps and buying individual stocks yourself. Go talk to an actual human being who represents a mutual fund and get one of those set up.

When I had a steady income and almost no bills (forever ago) I got talked into a mutual fund from Oppenheimer Funds. I could afford to put like 75$ a month into it at the time. It was something that I didn't have to think about or actively manage. I think the general safest bet that is out there is something like an Index Fund. If there are any "returns" they should be reinvested into more fractional shares of the mutual fund. Avoid any place or product that requires you to put money into it every month (if something happens on your end there should be no penalty for not adding money into the mutual fund). You really shouldn't let anybody talk you into a mutual fund that has more than 10% in high risk stocks/investments. Pay close attention to any mention of penalties for cashing out some or all of your shares of the fund.

After that, just don't pay attention to it. Put a few bucks in when you can afford it. Do some research about how to pay taxes on it and when to pay taxes on it for when you need to take money out of it. But don't spend any time watching the numbers, because they don't matter.

Hello! Here’s a few things to think about —

1. what are your goals?
2. how much income a month could you feasibly invest and still cover necessities AND still have an emergency fund? It’s important not to risk your personal stability for the sake of investment. I’d spend some time with your monthly budget and decide how much money you’d be ok with not having access to.

Here’s my (amateur) advice:

First of all, day trading is scammy and basically state-sanctioned gambling. The idea that you can suddenly make a ton of money by being a genius investor or whatever is a myth. Mutual funds, which contain a diverse mix of stocks, outperform hand-picked stock portfolios almost all the time (except at the highest level where investors can MAKE hand picked stocks successful because of the disgusting amount of money they’re playing with.) people who brag about making tons on GameStop or whatever either got lucky or are lying.

However, investing when young is a very, very good idea, and with inflation you’re basically losing money if you don’t do it. But this isn’t a way to increase your income—it’s a way to save for retirement / other big purchases and take advantage of interest.

I’m far from an expert, but first I’d recommend purchasing a Roth IRA. You can put in up to $6000 a year and it’s smart to max that out each year. If you have any money after that iMd put it in a mutual fund. For both IRAs and mutual funds, you can set up an account with a company like Vanguard or Fidelity and they’ll transfer the money from your bank and invest it for you.

After you’ve done that and paid off any high interest consumer debt (car/ credit card debt… I think personal finance assholes like Dave ramsey think all debt should be gone before investing but I’m pretty sure w/inflation & interest the conventional wisdom is now that it’s good to invest while still in debt ie with student loans). AFTER all that, maybe play around with buying specific stocks on an app. But treat it like gambling, because it is.

I recommend the blog Her First 100k (its politics are bad and girlbossy but it’s financial advice is sound in this capitalist hellscape). For the record, I’m a broke grad student, my salary is just above the poverty line, and I am only able to invest because my parents serve as my emergency fund for health/car emergencies. It may be that none of this advice is realistic right now, which sucks and isn’t your fault.

Don't fuck around with stocks before buying a house. The house as an investment itself will protect you way more than any stock market hocus pocus.

If you have debts, paying those off first is a better idea. Having enough money in your bank account for an unexpected emergency is also a better idea than investing.

If you have those sorted, find a brokerage (Merrill Lynch or Schwab or something) that'll let you open an account, and just use that to put $small into an index fund (some S&P 500 index like FXAIX) whenever you have money you can do without. You can get the money back out whenever, but it takes ~4 days to get your money back out of Schwab in an emergency (Merill is faster but charges more fees), and sometimes the market goes down.

There are tax-advantaged account types, but if you keep your money invested for a year or more it counts as capital gains, and those aren't taxed if you make less than $40k/year. If that's not enough, a Roth IRA is the best poor person retirement account type. If you have an employer that'll match a 401k contribution, always take the maximum match from that, but otherwise 401ks are for people who will work 40 years, pay off a 30-year mortgage, and reduce spending when they retire.

The best thing is like a 401k at your full time job with benefits because of the Mr taxman from which you retire at age 60.

Yeah do that.

If you're poor, you can't really invest. Sorry.

There is no way to invest (safely) that will pay off soon. At best you're looking at a 5-10 year horizon. Investing is long-term and requires a lot of discipline and security.

I started paying attention to stocks at the beginning of last year with gamestop. Since then I have tried to learn as much as I can from a leftist perspective. I am not an expert but I think I have a good, basic image of how this stuff works.

First you need enough money to invest and not touch. Can you put aside $100 right now and not touch it for 5 years? Does that seem like a crazy idea? If so then you probably don't have the temperament for investing (yet). Now, let's say you can do that. Can you watch its value go down 75% without pulling out? Would that depress you and make you too anxious?

If you have $100 right now and you can do all that stuff above, then you need to realize how restrictive that is. You are automatically locked out of most stocks worth holding long-term. Not all of them, but most. You're locked out because you never, ever want to blow your entire pile of capital on one trade or a single stock. That means even though you have $100 you only want to spend less than 5% of it on a single trade. The more of your money tied up, the more you're risking. Risk management is a huge thing with any investment.

What can you buy with $5? Not much. You're stuck with penny stocks. Penny stocks tend to have larger swings (more risk on top of what you already have!) and don't usually pay off very well. Sure you can go find lottery winners who bought some tech company at $2 and now it's worth $50. But there is no formula for finding those wins. No matter what anyone says, there is no sure thing.

So you buy a $5 stock. A month later it's worth $3. You're diamond hands though, and you're not flinching. Six months later it's $4.50. A year later it's $5 again. Another year after that it's $5.15. The company takes off and makes tons of money, they become an indispensable part of the American Economy (tm). It's now worth $50. You made 10x your money if you sell now.

Was that a good investment? Here's where math comes in. You have to evaluate investments. They use something called present value . Also see Khan Academy for more on this. You calculate a pay-off of an investment and work it backwards to see how much it's worth now.

Example: Say you know for sure that stock will be worth $50 in 5 years and you want to put down $5 now. You need to know the maximum amount you can make on that $5 per year, risk free. People often use the rates of savings account or federal government bonds. You calculate the amount that $5 is worth in 5 years at the current rate. Then you work backwards from $50 and discount it by the same rate for 5 years to the present. If that $50 is worth $10 today, then it's a good investment because you're only paying $5. If you calculate forward that your $5 could be worth $60 in 5 years by leaving it in a savings account, it's a bad investment because you could make more with way less risk by leaving it alone.

The other side of this is that your stonks don't go up, they remain flat or even decline. That's where risk management comes in. You need to have an exit plan should the stock not go where you want. Your trading platform will provide tools to set automatic stops so you don't have to watch it 24/7.

The most realistic thing would be your $5 is worth $8 after $5 years. Yeah you made money but you probably could have made more just working extra shifts. You sell your $8 and use that to buy more of another stock. $8 becomes $12 in another 5 years. Etc. It's a very slow and tedious climb.

You can work this out using a compound interest calculator. . Say you invest $5, you don't add anything to it, and it compounds annually. Set the interest rate at the S&P return average (8% I think?). You'll get an idea of how the growth works. If you want faster growth you need a higher return rate than the S&P which is harder and riskier.

You probably can't afford to touch options and they are about as dangerous as it gets in term of risk. Because they allow you to leverage your money, and most people eventually blow up any gains they initially get. This is where you see the loss porn on r/wsb.

I make it seem so hopeless because you need to understand that investing is for people with money to park their cash and see it slowly grow over time to offset inflation. Even a millionaire's money grows slowly, it's just that they start with so much that instead of making $3 over 5 years they're making $300000 over that time. And they can pay people to manage their risk and pay attention to stonks for them.

You can grow your money as a poor person but it requires capital. You should save as much money as you can right now, especially if you're young. Learn all you can about how capitalist investing works. Get enough starter capital to insulate yourself from risk and then start actually investing.

Take your current paycheck, spend 70% of it to live. Save 30% of it. Take the 30% of savings and split that up into 30%/30%/10%. 30% to stonks, 30% towards property, 30% in other things, 10% in cash.

Example: $100 pay check. $70 to live on, $30 to savings. The $30 in savings gets split. $9 (30% of $30) goes to stocks. $9 goes to property. $9 goes to property. $9 goes to other things. $3 goes to cash.

When you get to $50k for each category (except cash) you'll be dangerous. Then you can start actually consider making a living off day trading alone.

I say property because capitalists make money two ways. One is to exploit labor, the other is to exploit property (rent-seeking behavior). They become landlords or lenders of some sort. They start businesses and steal surplus value from others. That's how you become wealthy. Obviously you're against that idea because you realize what it actually means. But that doesn't mean you can't buy things at a low price and sell them at a higher price. Doesn't have to be a necessity like housing or cars.

Other things can be stuff like precious metals, bonds, retirement savings accounts, etc.

There are tools you can use to increase your purchasing power, but they come at a price. If you have good credit, you can borrow money for investments. I would never borrow money for stonks because that's insane. But you can borrow money for property or starting a business or 501c non-profit. You can use debt as a way to build wealth. This is what all the cool capitalists have been doing for the past 40 years.

At that point it's all about managing cashflows as part of risk. You don't what to over-leverage yourself into a crushing debt.

If you don't have good credit, build it. Get a shitty credit card from anyone who will give it. Put a tiny amount of debt on there, pay it off at the end of the month. Keep doing that for a year. Then get a better credit card. Do the same thing. Keep it going until you have good cards with large amounts of credit on them. It takes years to do this from nothing.

If you have freshly bad credit, you have to wait like 7 years for it to go away (thanks Obama).

The next big step is then legal tax avoidance. But that's a whole nother long post.

If you're looking to get started, I would avoid anything that has been incorporated more recently than like 2010, which includes Webull and stuff like Robinhood. I've had good results with TD Ameritrade, who don't charge for services, give you everything you need to get started, and can be linked with your existing bank account pretty easily to add/withdraw funds as needed.

That said, do not put any money in that you can't afford to lose, do not borrow money for the purposes of buying stocks, and frankly I wouldn't put any money in right now. The market's been trending down since like January which means it's a riskier bet than it normally is.

You should not expect to make more than 7% a year or so on your money through investing. So unless you have years of salary saved up, you will not replace or even meaningfully supplement your wage income for a long time.

I would focus on your CS career. It's a lucrative field and jobs are relatively easy to get right now.