People who don't know much about the stock market often search for information online.
They search for things like "stocks for beginners" because they feel overwhelmed and confused before they even start.
If you don't understand the stock market, the good thing is that you probably don't have any money in it and haven't lost anything this last year.
Right now, anyone who does have money in stocks probably feels kind of sick right now because of how much they have lost.
You should learn from this horrendous market correction that nothing is safe in the stock market.
Some people have lost much more than they should have because they were over confident and had too much of their money in stocks.
Additionally, many lost because they had too much in one particular stock or one particular sector.
When you invest in the stock market you should always buy a variety of stocks.
This is called diversifying and is important because you do not want to expose yourself to too much risk.
When you buy stocks that are in different industries, you make sure that you will not lose everything if one of those industries happens on hard times.
Of course, in a down market where all stocks are suffering as we have now, diversification will seem like it is not working that well.
However, it is always safer to spread your bets around to different companies so as to position yourself to not lose everything.
Right now the stock market is way down from its highs a couple of years ago.
Fortunes have been lost as well as many people's retirement savings.
If you are in the stock market it must feel like your pocket has been picked.
The problem we all face is that at some point the market will reverse course and many people will not have anything to put back in to make some of the losses up.
Right now it seems like the market will never go up but it will and you have to be ready.
If you have nothing left after this debacle however, there will be nothing you can do to reclaim some of your losses.