I’m considering buying one share of stock in ISC as a Christmas gift for my wife (and possibly one share for myself), but I don’t know the first thing about the stock market.
Is it possible to buy just one or two shares of stock? Is it expensive? Is it worth it? I realize that we’re not going to be able to retire on the profit from just one share, even if it goes through the roof, but I’m not looking to take a bath on it either.
What’s the cheapest way to aquire a share, if all I really want it for is the novelty of owning one?
We normally can’t afford to blow money like this, but I happen to have a little bit of “found money” that I can play with at the moment. Please dumb it down for me.
Sharebuilder has $4 trades and can do fractional shares, even a single share. That’d probably be your best place to look. You’ll probably take a bath on the commission when you sell (it’s executed as a live trade with a $16 commission) but as you said, barring immense gains in value and some stock splits a couple shares ain’t going to gain much value. And thus I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to do. For a long-term hold of even a single share, something like the S&P 500 spider tracker (SPY) would be better, though at $126 a share it might be a bit past what you were thinking about. Assuming a purchase price of about $47, you’d be looking at a $51 purchase of what is effectively a novelty. You can do certain types of investing when you only buy a relatively small amount at a time but constantly repeat it, but you’d have to buy a new share preferably every paycheck. You don’t even get a share certificate these days.
If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you know anything about the market? As more and more retirement funding becomes privately controlled along the lines of IRAs and 401(k)s (a very good thing in my opinion), knowing something about investing is becoming ever more vital, even if it’s as simple as deciding how to split your investments and what stocks or index or mutual funds you want to invest in and how much you want to put into conservative investments like CDs.
http://www.oneshare.com/ specializes in single shares of stocks. I couldn’t honestly tell you whether they have ISC or not, but they seem to specialize in the “comemmorable” stocks like Disney, Coke, etc.