Getting started in stock investing

Received a call from a friend saying that he and his friend would like to know how to get started in investing (in stocks basically). So we met up the following day.

The topic is pretty broad and I was a little lost on how to get started... both of them have not invested before and I didnt want to overwhelm them with information. I let the "lesson" play itself out.... much like the presentation I did at NUS. Things just came to my mind to 'link' each topic together. I didnt want to teach them the conventional way of how 'everyone' got started because that's how 'everyone' got clobbered in the market. I wanted to let them in on things that really mattered and yet can be grasped by absolute beginners.

As I was shifting the car to another parking spot, I thought about how I could simplify the process, and what are the things that cause the markets to move. These are the things that I've come up with:

SHORT-TO-INTERMEDIATE TERM EVENTS
1) Actual/Anticipation of Quarterly earnings/loss reports
2) Profit guidance/warning
3) Dividends & Bonuses
4) Share buybacks
5) Stock splits/reverse-splits
6) Upgrades/Downgrades
7) Institutional and other 'Big Fish' activity
8) Insider activity

INTERMEDIATE-TO-LONG-TERM EVENTS
1) Economic/Business cycle
2) Institutional activity
3) Insider activity
4) Monetary policies
5) Liquidity (either generated from within the system or injected from external sources)

The biggest question question in investing is actually what to do in times like the present moment. We've just come from a good run that started in mid'03 and slowed down after the inflation is starting to creep in, causing the FED to start applying the brakes (raising interest rates, and are expecting to continue raising them). This is when the economic data are showing mixed numbers (some good, some bad), and the intermediate-to-long-term investors would usually feel quite bored because things are not really moving.

If you've noticed, I havnt mentioned anything about technical analysis at all. I would probably teach it to beginners at a later stage and show them how it fits into what-ever investment horizon they have as well as its usefulness when the information that's coming in are not giving any clear direction but they can still extract some profit from what the market is telling them.