Do you have a minimum investment amount?

Hi All,

This question doesn’t really apply to DRIP investors. But for those that take dividends in cash:

Curious what everyone is doing on this. Back in the day there were fees per trade and so to minimize friction costs, it made sense to save up a certain amount of money before buying more shares to keep the fees down to an acceptable percentage, maybe 1 to 3%.

But, now, with no fees at all on buy’s (and only the SEC fee on sales), there is no reason not to invest dividends almost as they come in.

I haven’t really had a rule of thumb that I follow, but do you have comments regarding this? What do you do? Buy a few shares at a time as dividends role in or save up until you can make a more substantial purchase?

Rich

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I still DRIP. If I don’t, I find that I end up with cash sitting in an account for an extended period of time with little awareness of it - and even though there may not be a fee to buy, there is still a “small lot” cost/spread involved in trying to purchase less than 100 shares.

I DRIP my smaller positions that I would like to build bigger. I have some that I’m overweight in so I use those dividends to build up smaller positions or hold to take advantage of big drops.

Hi Hawkwin,

What broker are you using that still charges odd-lot fees?

I haven’t had odd-lot fees since the early 1990’s, late 1991 maybe (?).

In March 2020 when I was plunging every cent in our brokerage accounts into the melee, I was buying odd-lots. In our taxable account, I put in a purchase and it hit low enough that I bought a single share a few minutes later, leaving less than $1 in the account.

As far as dividends go …

I generally let my dividends drop as cash rather than using auto-reinvest.

As far as DRIP goes, I haven’t had a DRIP account since the mid 1990’s when I closed them all and transferred the shares to our taxable brokerage account. Too many accounts and statements.

Does that help you?

Gene
All holdings and some statistics on my Fool profile page
https://community.fool.com/u/gdett2/activity (Click Expand)

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You don’t see it as a fee. It shows up in the difference between the bid/ask.

That being stated, with share prices now priced to the fraction of a penny, it may not matter very much.