Look­ing for a spe­cial gift for your child this Christ­mas? Think of giv­ing in­vest­ments, such as stocks. These long-term in­vest­ment in­stru­ments make great gifts for chil­dren, main­ly be­cause chil­dren have a long-term in­vest­ment hori­zon. Mean­ing they have time on their side. As a par­ent, it's ex­treme­ly re­ward­ing to be able to help your kids start build­ing wealth for their fu­ture. Along with the gift you can al­so add chil­dren in­vest­ment lit­er­a­ture that teach­es the child the val­ue of mon­ey and the val­ue of in­vest­ing. Its im­por­tant to re­alise that de­spite the lat­est Stock Mar­ket cri­sis, stocks over time have pro­vid­ed bet­ter than av­er­age re­turns to in­vestors with long-term ob­jec­tives.

The first step is to de­cide how to in­vest in or buy the shares of stock you are plan­ning to give. You can give the gift of one share of stock or more if you wish. Once you buy the first share for the child any­one can con­tin­ue adding to the ac­count by buy­ing more shares. You can al­so buy more shares at dif­fer­ent times, for ex­am­ple one share for birth­days, an­oth­er share for Christ­mas etc. The div­i­dends earned by the shares of stock can au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be rein­vest­ed to buy more.The sec­ond step is to de­cide what to in­vest in or what com­pa­nies' shares to buy or what type of port­fo­lio you want to set up for the gift. Since this is a gift for a child you want to keep two things in mind.

First the child has a long-term hori­zon, prob­a­bly un­til re­tire­ment and sec­ond­ly you want to buy shares in com­pa­nies that of­fer growth for that long-term hori­zon. You will, there­fore, need to check out The Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change. It is the na­tion's cen­tralised mar­ket place for the buy­ing and sell­ing of shares or stocks and oth­er se­cu­ri­ties. In ad­di­tion to in­creas­ing the in­vest­ment op­tions avail­able to in­di­vid­u­als, it al­so pro­vides a mech­a­nism through which com­pa­nies can raise cap­i­tal for ex­pan­sion pur­pos­es by is­su­ing stocks and bonds. In­vestors have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to own a part of the some of the largest and most prof­itable com­pa­nies in the coun­try, as a mat­ter of fact, in the re­gion and can earn ex­tra in­come from div­i­dends. In­creas­ing share prices in­crease in­vestors' wealth.

Shares of­fer in­vestors some pro­tec­tion against in­fla­tion, and can be used as col­lat­er­al to ob­tain loans from fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions. It could serve well to get the child a ses­sion with a fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor. This would be a great gift, es­pe­cial­ly with the cur­rent fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion. An ad­vi­sor can help you get your 2011 in­vest­ing plan nailed down. As well, get them a sub­scrip­tion to a good fi­nan­cial pub­li­ca­tion or web site. The Wall Street Jour­nal im­me­di­ate­ly comes to mind. The Fi­nan­cial Times is al­so good. Buy what you know. This means in­vest­ing in the com­pa­nies whose goods and ser­vices you use dai­ly. Use this idea along with the con­cept of own­ing ba­sic in­dus­tries, such as food, bank­ing, util­i­ties, en­er­gy etc. What these in­dus­tries have in com­mon is that they pro­vide goods or ser­vices that peo­ple need reg­u­lar­ly.

So think "out­side the box" when giv­ing your child a gift this Christ­mas. Stocks is, in­deed, the gift that tru­ly keeps on giv­ing.