I was never interested in playing the stock market, mostly because it seemed like it all took place in the kind of atmosphere that I'm not inclined to appreciate: frantic, chaotic, hassled, and (worst of all) stuffy and exclusive. What I was missing out on, though, was the chance to make more money.

Fortunately, these days it's a lot easier for the average citizen to get their foot in the door of the financial world. Companies like Scottrade, Ameritrade, E*Trade, Charles Schwab, and others have all made it easier for people to trade stocks.

The question that I face, then, is not how to trade, but which stocks. For this advice I usually look to the TV experts from shows like Fast Money and Mad Money - people like Pete Najarian, Karen Finerman, Guy Adami, and Jim Cramer. They're the experts, so I don't have to be, right? That's the theory, anyway.

The only remaining problem, then, is that even though they're speaking English (or some form of it) I can't understand half of what they're saying. It's like they have their own special dialect or something. Reading the recaps helps, but even then I sometimes have questions about what they're talking about. When that's the case, I usually refer to one (or both) of two sources: Investopedia and InvestorWords. They're both great sources for finding out what exactly all these people are talking about. The other resource I use a lot, mostly just to look up information about a company, is Yahoo! Finance.

I know that there is infinitely more that I could learn about the stock market, and I probably would if that were my profession. But it's not my profession (I have one of those already). For me, it's something I get the opportunity to do to hopefully make some extra money in my spare time.