Hi naverave,

Glad to hear from you and welcome to the community.

The first thing that in my opinion it is important for people who are new to the markets to understand is that there is a difference between trading and investing.

In general most people think of traders as people who employ shorter term strategies that are more speculative in nature and therefore more risky.

Investors on the other hand in general employ longer term strategies which are generally considered less speculative than trading.

So if you are interested in learning how to invest while there are things here that can be used, this is really a site that is built for people wanting to learn how to trade. So with this in mind if this is the route that you are looking to go I would recommend the Motley Fool as a great place to start with this and have included a link to their website below:

Fool.com: Stock Market Advice | Stock Investing Advice

If you are interested in learning how to trade then you are in the right place. With $500 I think most traders would say that you are pretty low on trading funds so at this point it may be best to simply paper trade until you have built up enough capital to open a decent size trading account.

As far as which market to start with I like the Forex market because it is in my opinion a very technically oriented market and many of the things that you learn when learning how to trade the forex market can be transfered to trading other markets such as stocks or futures.

Secondly I like the fact that the paper trading accounts are so real and you can get free realtime charts which is a big bonus when learning how to trade and not wanting to spend a lot of money.

We are in the process of putting together a forex course now as well so if you have not done so already you can check that out at the link below:

InformedTrades : Learn Trading. Trading Education. | - Free Forex Trading Course

If there are any other thoughts on this one please feel free to post them below.

Best Regards,
Dave