Brokerage Firm

Anyone know of a stock brokerage firm that will let me trade 1 share of stock at a time?

 

LOL

 

All of them will but they might charge as if it was 100 shares.

 

Maybe he's trading BRK.A.

 

Sure laugh at me. However, not everyone is as rich as you guys.

 

Trading one share worked for me when I started day trading. I had an account with Financial Cafe with two hundred dollars in it and market orders were free. I lost 100 bucks before I found an edge then I increased the account to 2000 dollars and made 8000 dollars profit in two months. Could of made a hell of a lot more but if I traded more than 50 shares, I got sorry fills. When the in/out fee was increased to 6 dollars my edge disappeared.

 

Looks like those guys are out of business. Unless I used the wrong domain. Thefinancialcafe.com

 

financial cafe was bought out and I think this other outfit either closed or merged.

 

Call the company's investor relations dept. they will let you buy one share without a brokerage fee in most cases.

 

As someone else said, you can trade 1 share almost anywhere, but the commissions are usually at least $1 (for anywhere from 1-100 shares). While there are certainly exceptions, you'll probably find that trading one share, you'll be spending way too much in commissions to succeed (in making money).

Even with firms that have a minimum commission of $1 (like www.interactivebrokers.com), if you're trading the average large-cap stock (which is priced around $25), you're paying 8% commission for a round-trip. That's a huge load unless you have a big edge to begin with (which I doubt).

The best thing you can do is paper-trade (record trades on paper or spreadsheet as if you made them for real, or use one of the many free simulators) and see if what you're doing makes money. Make sure you account realistically for commissions, and that, if you are trading something with a wide spread between the bid and ask, that you are buying at the ask price and selling at the bid, not at the last trade price. While you're doing this, save up your money until you get $2K-$5K that you can play with. If your paper-trading is successful (i.e. significantly beating the ~3-4% return you can get with treasuries), go ahead and open up an account and do it for real. If your paper-trading is not successful, don't think (like many people do) that when you do it with real money, it will be better, because exactly the opposite is true - it's much easier to make objective decisions when real money is not on the line.