After realizing I couldn’t build a portfolio of individual stocks for $500, I began to lose interest in the market as a whole. It seemed as though I would be decades away from having the kind of money needed to invest in the market.

Of course, this wasn’t true at all. Instead of being drawn in by huge gains and ways to double my money in a month (my own company’s advertisements seemed to be having an effect on me!), I instead made the decision to actually learn about personal finances and investing.

The last time I made this decision was with poker, and I’ve found there to be some striking similarities between the learning process of these two subjects. When I first started poker, all I wanted was a cheat sheet of which cards to play, as I figured this was the quickest way to beating the vast majority of players. For the most part, I was right. Yet I had barely skimmed the surface of learning about poker, and I soon realized that by purchasing recommended books and learning more about the foundations of the game, I could not only become much more knowledgeable about the subject, but increase my profits even further.

My first step in this process was visiting the Morningstar Investing Classroom and reading all of their information provided. It was an informative, albeit slightly overwhelming, introduction to the world of investing. I continued my online research with sites such as Motley Fool, CNN Money, and MSN Money.

To satisfy my desire to know what it would be like to actually invest in individual stocks, I opened up a portfolio at Yahoo! Finance and invested a mock $3000 into 7 or 8 stocks recommended by my company. At the same time, I invested $3000 into the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFINX). I thought it would be interesting to compare these two as time went on, buying and selling in my company’s portfolio per their recommendations, while just letting the index fund work its magic.

At the same time, I continued my research, posing questions I had both to internet forums and to one of the analysts at my company, who was kind enough to put up with a neophyte. I soon realized though that I was nearing the end of information I could find for free.