You got your first paycheck, and you don’t want to waste it all. You worked hard for your job, studied and struggled your way through school and exams, and finally, your efforts have paid off. You’ve already bought yourself something special to commemorate the occasion. What do you do with it? You could let it sit in your bank account and accumulate interest, or you could play the Wolf of Wall Street and invest it.

Investing was once considered the game of the elite, where buying stocks involved making calls to the stock market and wiring money to make trades. However, that is no longer the case, as with the internet, it is now entirely possible to do all that from your desktop or mobile phone.

Introduction To Digital Trading

With the rise of the internet, many services have moved online, and banking is no different. Online trading has been the norm for at least a few years, if not longer, with many Indian banks allowing their clients to open demat accounts to buy and sell stocks and invest in mutual funds.

To do so, simply discuss with your bank about opening an online trading account, also called a demat or dematerialised account, which allows you to interact with the stock market and acts as a sort of online warehouse for all your stocks and securities. The process of opening such an account is typically quite easy and requires a short bank visit, filling out some forms and submitting a KYC.

Nor is it limited to the desktop, because in recent years, mobile trading has become increasingly common. While it still requires a demat account and a KYC, you can now perform many of the usual share market functions entirely from your mobile phone. Consult your bank manager to ask which app will work best for you. Many banks have partnered with these apps to make the whole trading process easier for their users.

Also occasionally called an “online trading app”, it covers everything from buying and selling shares to arranging SIPS and managing your portfolio. You can even sign up to get notifications about ongoing and upcoming IPOs. IPOs, which stand for initial public offering, refer to when a once private company puts its stocks on the market for the first time, allowing the public to buy and trade them. These stocks tend to come at a lower price and offer the opportunity to gain the status of a shareholder.

Some of these apps even allow users to trade in futures and Options (f&o), by which investors are able to hedge risk by speculating on the future price of a security on a set date and agreeing to buy and sell it at that price regardless of fluctuations. As an example, suppose you agreed to buy 25 stocks of a company at 50 rupees each at a future date, come to that date, and the company will have to sell the stocks at 50 rupees even if the price drops to 45 or rises to 55\.

Conclusion

The world of share market trading, which was once considered the playground of the wealthy, is now more accessible than ever. Users can now do most of the world of trading from their phones, from shares and stocks to mutual funds and SIPs to Futures and IPOs. However, one should still approach the market with a degree of caution as it still involves large sums of money. And above all, remember that stock trading is a game of patience, not rashness.