“Fractional shares can be beneficial to many investors and provide flexibility,” said Milan Galik, CEO of Interactive Brokers. “For example, say you would like to buy just $500 worth of an expensive stock, or are looking to diversify among more investments. Now you can with fractional share trading.”
Along with the fractional shares feature, Interactive Brokers recently created cash quantity stock orders, which let clients place orders in a specific dollar amount instead of specifying the number of shares. For an account trading in fractions, if the dollar amount does not line up exactly with a whole number of shares, fractional shares will automatically be bought or sold.
“With fractional shares and the ability to enter orders in dollar amounts, you can easily purchase $100 or $10,000 of stock, without having to pull out a calculator,” Galik explained.
Fractional shares can also help investors maximize their returns by making it easy to put small cash balances to work quickly, rather than holding cash and potentially earning lower returns. Combined with Interactive Brokers’ commission-free pricing plan, fractional shares provide a more affordable way to invest more often. Investors can buy stocks with less money rather than waiting until they have enough to buy whole shares and put more money into investments instead of commissions. In the coming weeks, financial advisors will also be able to use fractional shares when allocating trades to multiple clients.
“Interactive Brokers serves over 673,000 clients in 195 countries around the globe and we want to make investing accessible to all,” Galik said. “We believe that adding the ability to buy slivers of stocks helps in achieving this goal.”
Once enabled, you can trade fractional shares from our IBKR Mobile, Client Portal or beta desktop TWS platforms.
For more information, visit: ibkr.com/fractions
About Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.:
Interactive Brokers Group affiliates provide automated trade execution and custody of securities, commodities and foreign exchange around the clock on over 125 markets in numerous countries and currencies, from a single IBKR Integrated Investment Account to clients worldwide. We service individual investors, hedge funds, proprietary trading groups, financial advisors and introducing brokers. Our four decades of focus on technology and automation has enabled us to equip our clients with a uniquely sophisticated platform to manage their investment portfolios at the lowest cost according to Barron’s Best Online Brokers review, February 25, 2019. We strive to provide our clients with advantageous execution prices and trading, risk and portfolio management tools, research facilities and investment products, all at low or no cost, positioning them to achieve superior returns on investments.