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
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?