Buying Single Shares of Stock

Disclaimer: I am not a qualified financial adviser. Now that we have that out of the way, check out Sharebuilder.com. Sharebuilder makes investing easy for people that don't want to dump thousands of dollars at a time into the stock market.

There are two ways to buy stocks on Sharebuilder...real-time traditional stock "Trades" (purchasing in any number of shares...even single shares) ...OR... in dollar amounts through the automatic investment plan that you can setup. The automatic investment plan lets you pick the stocks you want to invest in, and specify how much money you want to spend on them each month or week. Instead of buying 100 shares of Coke at the market price, you can buy $10 of Coke (which will get you a fractional share)...or you can buy $60 if you want to...or even just $1 of coke. The concept behind the automatic investment plan is to accumulate stocks over a long period of time. Historically, the stock market has returned something like 10% over the past 75 years. Compare this to bank interest or interest on a CD. 10% is great. The stock market has its daily ups and downs, but averaged out over time, it goes up.

If you want to learn more, check out these sites:

Sharebuilder
Fool.com
CNN Money
Yahoo Finance

Here's another cool site, where you can buy one share of stock for display. The shares are real and the cool part is, you get the certificate.

One Share