If you’re a carpenter, why do you own tools? Tools make your job easier. Stock trading tools serve the same purpose. They help you to make better choices but if you talk to the average part time or amateur investor, you will find that not only do they not have a good arsenal of stock trading tools, they don’t know what should be in that arsenal. Keep reading to find out.

The first thing I want you to have is a stock broker that caters to the individual investor. When I first started trading, I had one of the well known brokerage houses but it wasn’t set up for me, the amateur. I later switched to Scottrade. Their website is easy to understand, their charts have plain English that explains what I’m looking at, and I even went to one of their investors seminars. This was a free seminar where they took us through their website and explained all of the features. I think the single best tool you can have is a quality broker.

The next tool that you need is access to quality research. Let’s be real. You probably aren’t going to read through a prospectus nor are you going to read SEC filings. My suggestions for research are Yahoo! Finance, Bloomburg news, Investor’s business daily online, and CNBC. There are so many more but have your go-to sites that you read each day.

On that same subject, you are going to have to keep track of the regular, non-financial news. The news affects the market so you have to keep up.

The next item in your batch of stock trading tools is friends that share your interest. Form an investing club, talk daily with a friend or friends that also invest. I do that. I also subscribe to Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts Plus . In this service, he send out e-mail updates each day telling what stocks he is trading and why. It is an invaluable service and well worth the small monthly fee. Not only have a learned a lot, I have made a lot of money thanks to Jim Cramer.

The final item in your bag of stock trading tips is the right perspective. Understand that you are going to lose a lot of money on some trades but stay in the game. Every trader loses money some times.

There you are. With these stock trading tools, you’re going to be well on your way to being a great stock trader.