The first thing that someone must do when considering investing in a business is determine whether that business is public or private. Publicly traded companies have stock shares available for purchase on the open market while private companies are owned by a family, individual, or exclusive group of investors. For example, Electronic Arts is a publicly traded company while Obsidian is privately owned, so one could invest in EA but not Obsidian. The easiest way to determine if a company is public or private is to simply call them and ask.

After determining that a business is, in fact, publicly traded the next step is to find the company’s “ticker symbol.” This symbol is used instead of the company’s full name in the stock exchange. EA’s ticker is ERTS, Microsoft’s is MSFT and so on. Something that can be confusing is that subsidiaries do not have ticker symbols. Bioware, for example, is owned by EA, therefore it does not have a ticker symbol. However, if someone invested in EA they would be indirectly investing in Bioware as well.

Once the company’s ticker symbol has been obtained a web search (in either Google or your search engine of choice) should give the perspective investor several useful pieces of information, namely a quote for one share of stock, price/earning ratio, and market cap. If the investor thinks he or she might be interested in investing after seeing these numbers he or she should look up the company’s annual report, 10k, and proxy statement. These documents tell everything an investor would want to know about a company.

Finally, a long term investor should think about a dividend reinvestment plan, which will allow him or her to reinvest his or her dividends in more stock, and/or a direct stock purchase plan, which will deduct money automatically from a savings or checking account for more stock at regular intervals. Both of these plans will increase wealth in the long run.