Buy expensive stocks - or build a whole portfolio - on the cheap. Fractional shares, increasingly available at online brokers including Schwab, Fidelity and Robinhood, allow you to buy a portion of a stock you might not otherwise be able to afford. You can even put together a portfolio of stock snippets, giving you a diversified ownership stake in the best of corporate America, even if you're just starting out and your budget is limited.
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Say you had $1,000 to invest and wanted to buy stock in NVR (NVR), a homebuilder recently rated Strong Buy by investment research firm CFRA. You'd be out of luck, considering the shares recently traded for about $4,200 a pop. But at Schwab, for example, you'd be able to buy what the company calls a Stock Slice - a single slice or up to 30 slices at a time of any S&P 500 stock for as little as $5 per slice, commission-free. With Fidelity's Stocks by the Slice program, you can access more than 7,000 U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for as little as $1.
You can also trade fractional shares at Robinhood and InteractiveBrokers, each with programs starting at $1. Eligible stocks and ETFs at Robinhood trade for more than $1 per share and have a market value of more than $25 million. InteractiveBrokers allows trading in U.S. and European stocks and ETFs. Vanguard is testing fractional trading of Vanguard ETFs for launch later this year. The rules and eligible investments for fractional share-buying differ by broker, so be sure to compare options.
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