If you're interested in investing in the financial markets, one of the first things you need to do is find a stock broker. A stock broker is essentially the "middle-man" between you and the stock exchange. You place an order to buy a stock and your broker fills the order by buying those shares on the designated stock exchange.

In olden days, you as an individual investor would need to work directly with a personal broker who could then charge you outrageous commission fees ranging up to $300-400 just to buy stock in a company.  Fortunately, with the advent of the internet age low-cost brokerages can offer the same services for a small fraction of those costs. Discount brokerages often let you trade stocks for less than $10 per trade.

Discount brokerage firms allow you to place trades directly on their website and those orders are then passed to the stock exchanges and usually filled within a matter of seconds. An added benefit of many of the discount brokerages is that they have offices nationwide, so should you need to contact someone it is generally easy to get a live person on the phone to assist you.