On the Yahoo home page, you can create the financial section and in it you can create portfolios. This is a simple, free way to follow your simulated stock purchases. Yahoo also provides headlines and news reports regarding the market and individual stocks.
You can also go to Investopedia and read a library full of information about investing, trading, and individual stocks. They too have a stock simulator and their site is full of good advice about individual stocks.
Rather than trying to teach the world to you in one Yahoo Answer, I refer you to a couple of web sites as a good way to start:
http://www.fool.com/
http://www.investopedia.com/
You should also learn a little bit about reading about financial numbers, analytic numbers and annual reports of a company. Start looking up terms like:
Price to book value, tangible price to book, cash per share, assets, liabilities, debt to equity, gross margin, market cap value, Price to earnings, P.E.G. (Price to Earnings Growth), share float
Fool should have a stock screener, but there are others.
There are also various free on-line games
http://www.smartstocks.com/
where you invest in stocks buying and selling, with virtual dollars and see how you do.
There are a few contests where you can win real money.
Add: Yahoo Finance has a lot of information and capabilities also.
Go on E-Trade and start an account. I think you can start a practice one and pretend you bought stock. If you can't do that, then just set up a fake "Portfolio" on Yahoo.... it's pretty nice.
Get me about 500 shares of Ford (F) and 500 of US Steel (X). Good old companies.
How do I even look at socks or search stocks or anything? I wanna pretend like I bought a stock and track it for a bit before I actually buy stocks. How can I do this?
