I will show you how to open a trading account and how to buy stocks. This will be biased for The Netherlands.

1) Open a trading account at FlatexDEGIRO

I invest using FlatexDEGIRO. This is an online broker: where you can buy and sell shares and other financial products. It’s cheap, easy and safe. Back in the day, you could only trade via banks, and it would cost you a lot. I worked for two years at this company.

https://www.degiro.nl/open-een-rekening

2) Buy a stock or an ETF

It is easiest to limit your purchases to stocks (parts of a company) or ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). When you buy an ETF it’s like a buying a bunch of shares with a certain common characteristic: e.g. technology, clean energy. Or for instance all the stocks in an index, like the S&P 500 or the AEX. Investing in ETFs is often regarded as a good and safe way to invest, because it diversifies the risk relative to investing in singular stocks.

1 – On the DEGIRO platform, in the search box, type the stock you want. e.g. Airbus.

As you see, you have some options to choose from. .

The first three letters in the second column (EPA, XET) represent the exchanges the shares are traded on. I typically choose EPA (Euronext Paris) if possible. It’s cheaper than XET (Xetra) on DEGIRO. For the rest, this does not really matter.

Every share has a unique code, called an ISIN code. For airbus it’s: “NL0000235190”. If it is a different share, it has to have a different code. Since those ISIN codes are the same for all the Airbus lines, you know it’s the same stock, just traded on different exchanges.

2 – click “BUY”, at the top right.

3 – Put in your order, here you put in how many shares you want to buy, and for what price

With a limit order, you can say how many shares you want against what price. You can say, I want to buy 50 shares for EUR 110. As you can see, the price now is higher than EUR 110. So nobody will sell it to you against that price at the moment. If the share price goes below EUR 110, your order will be executed: somebody was willing to sell to you for EUR 110. The risk here is that you put in an order and it will never get executed. There is a solution:

With a market order, you just put in the amount of shares that you want, let’s say 50. It will immediately get executed (if markets are open) against the best available price. I typically do this, because I just want to have the shares. Maybe sometimes I leave a euro on the table, but I buy shares with a long-term view, so I do not really care. Why overcomplicate your life?

4 – you click: “place order”.

Is that it? Yes!

Something you need to think about: European markets are typically open from 09:00 to 17:30 every day. So if you decide in a bar you need to sell your shares on Friday night, you will have to wait till Monday. You can google the opening times of non-European markets if you are interested.

After purchasing some stocks, the list in your possession is called your portfolio. Congratulations, you must treat it as a child and nurtureit with investment every month.

It is good to have some uncorrelated investments. You need around 10 stocks in your portfolio to profit from the benefits of diversification (same expected return, lower volatility (risk).

If you have questions you can call DEGIRO helpdesk.

Now that you know how to invest, you can choose what to invest in. You can choose ETF’s to follow the beginner’s way, for instance an S&P500 tracker, or a World stocks tracker. Or you can pick stocks that you believe might perform well.

I align my investments with macro themes (great patterns in the economy) and I prefer stocks that I believe are currently cheap. You can read about these macro patterns on the next pages. Individual investment opportunities (that align with these patterns) can be found in my blog page called: investment opportunities.