There are a broad range of stocks available to invest in, and ideally, you want to pick the stocks that best match your investing style. What is your investing style you may ask yourself? Well, if are you interested in short-term growth with higher risks, than you may want to look at penny stocks. If you would rather not take as much of a risk, but allow your investment to grow over time, you may want to consider some type of income stock, which sometimes can even pay a dividend on the shares that you own. A dividend is a profit sharing incentive offered by some companies on the shares of their stock to help make up for the slower growth those stocks experience.

If you wish, you can invest in technology stocks, such as Google, or Yahoo, hoping to be a part of the next dot-com rush by maybe finding a company that will experience some explosive growth, or you can invest in health care stocks like Johnson and Johnson. Technology and health care stocks are known as sector stocks, one of the many available investment options that are available to you as an investor. Other types of sector stocks may include Public Utilities, Mining stocks, or even Pharmaceutical stocks.

You can find stocks that are cyclical in nature, their price is affected by what is happening in that industry, and if that industry is doing well as a whole, then those stocks will perform better and experience more growth, whereas if that industry is performing poorly, the stocks will reflect that and now show as much growth. The automobile industry is a good example of a cyclical investment, as consumers have more money to spend due to a good economy, they may decide to purchase a new vehicle, but when times are tough, they may choose to just repair the old vehicle.

There is also another classification of stock, which goes beyond growth, income, cyclical, or sector. Here we are talking about Preferred stock and Common stock. Some of the differences between the two are that in most cases, if a dividend is offered on the stock, a preferred stock dividend is pretty constant in the amount that is paid to the investor, meaning that the payout will not rise and fall as much as the dividends that are paid out on a share of common stock, which may fluctuate higher or lower. If the company declares bankruptcy, and the assets are liquidated, those that hold preferred stock will be paid back before those that hold common stock, but in some cases, all the investors could loose their money.

Picking a stock can take some time as you see, and it requires a lot of research, but one of the first steps you want to look at is what do you want to achieve, and armed with that knowledge, you will soon find an investment option in stocks that best suits your needs.