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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EnricoPalazzo who wrote (35424)	11/27/2000 11:00:27 PM
From: H Peterson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

ardethan, thanks for your response to my portfolio survey. But there's also the matter of increased commissions. When you have an extremely large portfolio, say 100K, the commissions involved in buying ten stocks aren't very significant. But when you're talking about selling $2000 worth of Q, and diversifying into 8 other stocks, that's about $200 in commissions right off the bat, for an instant 10% loss. Furthermore, whenever you put more capital in, you have to spread it out across these stocks if you want to maintain the portfolio's balance--for a cost of $200 per. Commissions was a great concern of mine. When I was 100% buying in QCOM I had my on-line account with ETrade paying $19.95 a trade. It was killing me buying sometimes one share at a time. I think the major reason I decided to sell my QCOM and diversify in more stocks was the following reason. Datek was offering new customers 10 free trades if you started a new account with them. That gave me the ability to sell my QCOM in my ETrade account and send the money to Datek. Then I bought the 9 shares with one trade to spare commission free. So the total commission of selling QCOM and buying 9 different stocks was $19.95. Now I am adding shares to my basket at $9.99 instead of $29.95. I try to save up enough to buy at least 2 shares at a time which only adds on $5.00 a share. With Gorilla's, I don't think $5.00 is that bad in the long term. E.g. when I save up a thousand or so, I'll put it in, and buy one stock (probably one I don't own yet). This really cuts down on the commissions, which will kill you in the end. With only sending in about $50 a week, if I waited until I had a thousand dollars in my account before I bought I would miss out on some good dips. H Peterson

To: EnricoPalazzo who wrote (35424)	11/28/2000 12:04:36 AM
From: BDR	Respond to of 54805

Re: Commissions and small account balances A few months back there was a discussion here about this subject and several suggestions were made about brokerages that accepted small accounts and charged low fees. I don't recall the details but one I am aware of that you might want to check out is BuyandHold: buyandhold.com You can open an account with a very low balance (like $20) and commissions are $2.99 a trade though trading is retricted (not a bad thing if you really are going to buy and hold). Check out their fee schedule: buyandhold.com Does anyone recall the other similar brokerages that were mentioned last Spring? I thought there was one that allowed you to buy fractional shares. Note: I have not used them. I have my accounts at Fidelity.