<prompt> Human: I just turned 18 so I thought it was a good time to think about my personal finances and starting to invest my savings. After researching a bit about what investing methods there are and further researching about ETFs and how to detect a decent ETF I wanted to try getting a bit of experience using Ameritrades PaperMoney first but there is just this tiny itzy-bitzy small problem:I can not seem to find out how to actually trade ETFs. I open up the program and get confused immediately by all of the widgets and stuff and I can not find anything that says ETF anywhere. A bit of help on how to actually use ETF trading platforms would be appreciated.Assistant: As a starter, just google search for ETF ticker and choose one of those. Click buy in ameritrade and enter the ticker symbol i.e. VGT and enter the number of shares you want to buyHuman: I did not feel very comfortable with immediately buying ETFs with real money so I wanted to try myself at PaperMoney A simulated stock market with no real money in it first and to do that I had to use Ameritrades thinkorswim platform which does not offer a simple buy button.Assistant: You should certainly do what you feel comfortable with, but assuming youre comfortable with some sort of risk given that youre looking to invest some money in the market - it should be said that not all ETFs carry the same level of risk. You could start with one that tracks a large number of large cap companies, for example.Human: Would not it make more sense to wait for the market to crash before buying ETFs. The SP 500 went up for a long time now so it is very likely that it will crash in the near future or is there something wrong with my thought process?  <response>: that would be trying to time the market. Youll miss out on all the gains you could have had between now and when you decide to invest. Also, this is a favorite around here: 