newbie stock question

Discussion in 'Trading' started by asdfghj7, Oct 8, 2008.

  1. Is it possible to buy 20 or 50 shares of a stock through your online brokerage (tradestation, interactive brokerage, etc) or are you limited to intervals of 100? Thankyou
     
  2. I'm playing with a system and trading 10 shares at a time on ThinkorSwim.
     
  3. You can buy as many as you want.

    Or at least you should be able to... if not you should find a new broker.

    But be aware that depending on your commission and the price of stock, it might not be worth your time to buy a small amount.

    For example, say there's a stock that's trading at 5 dollars and you have $100 so you want to buy 20 shares of it. Say your broker charges $7 to buy and $7 to sell.

    Well if you buy that stock for $100, it's going to have to go up enough that your position is worth $114 just for you to break even on your purchase, because remember you have to pay $7 to buy and sell. So that means that in order to not lose money, your stock has to go up 14%. That's a lot.

    Now if you were buying $3000 worth, it would only have to rise to a total value of $3014 for you to break even, which is like .05%, which is much easier.

    Make sense?