Stock Investing by the Dollar, Not by the Share
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your money briefing for Friday, January 15th. I'm Charlie Turner for The Wall Street Journal. It used to be if you wanted to buy stock in a company, you had to pay whatever the share price was in order to do it. But lately, more investors are buying fractions of shares by the dollar.
It's just more accessible for people now. A lot of these platforms will, you know, show you the dollar up front. You don't have to kind of do the math on the back end or try and reframe your own approach. It's how it's presented to you.
So does buying stock by the dollar make more sense than buying by the share? We'll talk with our personal finance reporter, Julia Carpenter, about what this dramatic shift in stock purchasing is all about after the break.
Investors are increasingly buying stocks with an eye toward how much money they can afford to spend, rather than how many shares they want to purchase. More services are catering to this kind of investing, from online brokerages like Robinhood to established wealth managers like Fidelity and Charles Schwab.
What is fractional investing and why are people buying stocks by the dollar?
Let's talk about this growing investment trend with our personal finance reporter, Julia Carpenter. Julia, thanks for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Julia, it seems like this is becoming a pretty popular way of investing in stocks. Why are more people doing it this way?
When I was talking to investors who use these platforms and are intrigued by the idea of fractional investing, one of the things that kept coming up again and again is that they could choose the amount of money they wanted to put toward their investment. So while we have stocks like Netflix or Tesla that are in the hundreds of dollars, somebody who has $10 can put $10 toward those stocks. So it's appealing to people who like the idea.
So this concept of fractional investing is really taking off.
Absolutely. A lot of these big firms are releasing platforms. Robinhood is a really popular platform for this. There's a whole bunch of players in this space, but people on the whole are really drawn to the idea of being able to buy small slices.
Are there certain kinds of people who are more likely to purchase stock by the dollar?
I think I've talked with a lot of people who think about dollar cost averaging as their primary strategy. So those people usually want to smooth out any ups and downs. They want to be thinking primarily in dollars because it means they do less math on the back end. I think also a lot of younger people I spoke with, this is their only portal into investing. They don't have enough money to buy in shares. They don't have enough money to buy huge lump sums. So they're instead investing $10, $20, $100. And that automatically means they're thinking in that mindset.
How long has this idea of buying fractional shares been around? I mean, this is not brand new, is it?
No, a lot of this stuff isn't brand new. It's just being brought to people in a different way. So we've had penny stocks before, small cap stocks before. A lot of experts I talked to pointed out that thinking in dollars isn't new. You've always been thinking in dollars because you've had to buy things. But it's just more accessible for people now. A lot of these platforms will show you the dollar up front. You don't have to kind of do the math on the back end or try and reframe your own approach. It's how it's presented to you.
And who are the biggest beneficiaries of this shift?
It depends who you talk to. So I think when you think about it for the brokers, they're getting a whole new wave of investors. We've seen this big retail boom. This is attracting an entirely new kind of investor. It's making investing much more accessible to people. That's also benefiting the investors. When it's more accessible, that means you get more people into the market. And when I was speaking with one economist, he said the more people you get into the market, the more liquid the market is. So it's kind of
Which brokerages and platforms are enabling dollar-based stock purchases?
It depends on who you talk to as to who's benefiting the most, but I definitely spoke with a wide range of people who had either side to say.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–1:13
2
What is fractional investing and why are people buying stocks by the dollar?
1:13–3:59
3
Which brokerages and platforms are enabling dollar-based stock purchases?
3:59–5:58
4
Why do investors prefer thinking in dollars instead of shares?
5:58–6:54
Speakers
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