How do you get started?

There is ton's of information available on the internet. A great site for learning about investing in stocks and options is Investopedia.com, at this great site you can learn all kinds of things about investing from basic definitions to trading systems. Investopedia also has a fantastic trading simulator you can use for free. Create an account and join a game in the simulator and start to practice trading.

An excellent source for learning the ropes with Forex (FX) is babypips.com here you can learn alot of the basics regarding forex for free. There are also free public forums regarding forex trading, ForexFactory.com (FF) is a popular one that I have been posting in occasionally over the last 1.5years or so. My handle on FF is andante9.

It is a simple matter to set up a demo account in which you can practice trading forex. Just visit a broker site like FXDD.com and download a demo. Metatrader4 (MT4) is a very user friendly trading platform and is easy to set up.

A demo is a great way to learn the basics of what types of trades are available and how to place and modify and close trades. Make no mistake though there is a big difference between demo and live trading. First of all the demo feed is slightly different then the live feed - but that is not the main issue. In reality you will be dealing with the pyscology of live trading - mainly fear and greed. These are the enemies of a trader and when you go live you will learn all about them in great detail. For instance check out this link it is an online account anaylizer to which I've attached a demo account https://www.myfxbook.com/portfolio/members/andante9 In this account I've taken a demo account from 5000 dollars to over 7500 dollars since August. Why then can't I do this in my live account? Well fear is the answer here. You see in this demo account I have been trading with no stoploss so I could lose most of the account with one bad trade. (edit: I hit that one bad trade! LOL! There are other accounts there with better money management)

All that being said if you want to trade/invest read as much as you have time for and set-up a demo account and start practicing while you save for a live account.