I bought my first stock

Cashapp offers stock options. I bought into Apple and Alibaba.

Was the cost of the stock expensive?

Amazon is good

Congrats @Anthonio W and @Tonya it depends when you purchase the stick or how you are trading it. What I mean by that is, are you buying the Stock as an stock yielding a dividend for you for life. Or, are to you want to trade it as an Option trade.
If you are looking to get into investing do your homework on the company and talk with people who are investing or talk with a financial planner (who can help you with how you should invest).
Here are a few apps to check out: Robinhood, Webull, E-Trade, TD Trade - just to name a few.

To @Tonya B's question if the stock is expensive:

As of me checking on 7/16/2020 9:13A:

1. Amazon (AMZN) costs 3008.87
2. Alibaba (BABA) costs 249.21

While if it is expensive will depend on the individual. I will say that it is something everyone can afford at least through the CASH APP that @Antonio W. As you can buy a fractional share meaning you can just a part of a share for the amount of money you have available.

Thank you Deveri and Micky. I will do my research!!

You're welcome, Tonya B….happy to help.

I hope it works out for you.

Depends what stock you buy and hopefully it goes up and you sit on it for a long time while it keeps going up

I just started an account with Robinhood and added funds to purchase stock. They gave me a share of Macy’s for opening the account.

Congrats! That’s awesome!

I bought five different stocks for about $35 and they've been staying about the same for firsta month just looking and hoping that one takes off try to put the good one.

Be sure to diversify your portfolio.

To invest success, you guys must learn technical analysis. This is the bridge saving your time to become financially freedom!

Always important to remember to diversify.

I’ve recently started investing in stocks as well. Started on Cashapp and now on Robinhood.

To @Huu Tai L

To invest success, you guys must learn technical analysis. This is the bridge saving your time to become financially freedom!

Agree that technical analysis is a great tool as long as you understand and keep emotions in check. Otherwise I will say that it has lost some of my friends a lot of money. Also for those interested they should look up online (ex. investopedia) a little about "fundamental analysis". Which is the other major type of analysis.

To @Hoi W. & @Jeanne W.
Will you further clarify what you mean by diversify? I'm sure it will help a lot of people on this forum.

You don't want to"put all your eggs in one basket." If you build stock in 2 or 3 businesses and even one of those businesses go under, you will lose much of your money. If you spread out your portfolio by investing in stocks, bonds, savings, mutual funds, real estate etc. you will build $ over the long-term.

Congratulations! Definitely diversifying is the way to go.

Ok

Thank you @Jeanne W.

You don't want to"put all your eggs in one basket." If you build stock in 2 or 3 businesses and even one of those businesses go under, you will lose much of your money. If you spread out your portfolio by investing in stocks, bonds, savings, mutual funds, real estate etc. you will build $ over the long-term.

@Micky H. What's your opinion on all your eggs in index funds like Vanguard VTSAX if you can add to it and leave it for 15 yrs?

@Cat B. Asks a wonderful question. As a simple answer I would say, 15 years is a nice long time horizon and I think it's a great place to park your money. However, I'll use this moment to springboard into the topic of diversifying your portfolio.

I have never had anyone ever explain the reason for diversifying incorrectly. In fact I hear the saying that you don't want to keep "all your eggs in one basket" all the time. However, almost everyone I have coached have diverse holdings, but are technically still keeping everything in the same basket. Let's take this example.

One of my students said they diversify into buying stocks in different sectors and I said give me an example. So she said he bought into Paypal (Technology Sector) because she thought it would do well. To diversify she also bought Pepsi (Consumer Non-Durables). So both have an annualized return of 10.62% (pepsi) and 38.34% (paypal) between the time periods of 08/01/2015 - 07/31/2020 based on monthly returns. I was like these are great companies and surely they are diversified because they are in different sectors, but have you diversified your portfolio? She said of course my eggs are not in the same basket. However, they were and COVID 19 to be a good teaching point for it. When we say we don't want our eggs in the same basket it is a "RISK MANAGEMENT" strategy. It's not actually looking for gains, in fact to put things that actually diversify your portfolio hurt its growth. So we should be looking at correlation between assets for diversification and although between 08/01/2015 - 07/31/2020 the correlation between the two were .5 because PayPal was gaining so much if we look at the time between 2/1/2020 - and 4/1/2020 at peak COVID we see that the correlation is 1… Meaning they went down together (Those two eggs (stocks) were in the same basket) destroying any meaning to your risk management. So it's important to understand correlation between assets instead of diversifying sectors , industries etc. Of course that's not to say this diversification doesn't help but in this case during that month Pepsi is down 6% but by the end of it Paypal was up by 8% so why would you have used pepsi to prevent risk.

While we are in Risk management we can also use historical predictions. This brings us back to @Cat B's question. VTSAX is a total Market index. Though not exactly the same it does represent the U.S as a whole. So really the question is do you believe that the U.S will succeed. I'm sure there is bias when I say they will , so I don't find it a bad choice. But to diversify in this situation you don't need to go buy other assets you can use historical data as risk management. If you look at data historically the stock market through good or bad overall will have returned approximately 10% year over year of annualized returns. Based on historical evidence it is safe to say the percentage that a bad stock market in the U.S will last over 3-5 years and so if you hold enough cash for 3-5 years of bad years you should not need to add to any other assets other than VTSAX.

Again there are a lot of ways to look at these things. Diversification via sectors work too. I want people to understand there are other concepts making investing unlike budgeting more abstract. However, if you know the concepts you can create a better personal investment strategy. It is this personalization that makes one strategy succeed over another.

With the pandemic right now, would it be a good idea to invest now?

Per @Kitraina G:

With the pandemic right now, would it be a good idea to invest now?

Simple answer is yes.

Complicated answer is that it depends on your situation. If you have extra money without any purpose (living expenses, emergency savings, etc) than why have it lose value. Only way to not have the extra money lose value is to invest it. I assume when you say invest it is in regards to stocks, but you can also invest in education for yourself that will allow you to produce more income.