We now want to purchase the stock we selected. And, if we were populating a new portfolio, we could have gone right down the list of candidates, confirming the quality, evaluating the price as we did with FDS, and putting them all on our shopping list.

Of course, you can use whatever broker you’re accustomed to. However, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a new and special kind: a folio brokerage or “window trader.” This is one that saves money by combining all of its clients orders into one, filling what “sell” orders it can with its own clients’ “buy” orders and vice versa, going to market periodically with a large single order of shares remaining to be bought and sold, and finally distributing the shares among its clients electronically using fractional shares. This is called “Window Trading” and the savings are passed right along to the client.

These kinds of brokerages provide you with most of the benefits of a mutual fund with none of the drawbacks. For example, because they deal in fractional shares, you can invest in dollar amounts instead of shares. So you can spread whatever funds you choose to invest over as many companies as you wish, by percentage or by dollar amounts. Thus, you can diversify handily, investing a fixed amount regularly, spread over all of your stocks.

My personal choice is a company called FolioFN. I’ve watched them since they fiirst started out. And my main reason for liking them better than any others is that they go to market twice a day. Some of the others go as seldom as once a week. And they appear to be less expensive that any of the others. Check them out yourself. Google “folio investment” and see what it brings up.

[Note: Other than having my own money with this firm, I have no financial interest in it. My comments reflect only my reasons for having selected this broker for my own use.]

Ellis How to Invest bargain prices, broker, folio broker, Foliofn, investing, securities industry, stock market, window trading