On October 1, Charles Schwab announced that they were reducing their online trading commissions for U.S. and Canadian-listed stocks, options, and ETFs to $0, effective October 7. That’s zero dollars, as in completely free. Schwab previously charged commissions of $4.95 per trade before this announcement. In rapid succession, other major brokerage firms announced they too will be eliminating trading commissions.
Eliminating trading fees may have cost the major discount brokers each hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, this is actually great news for the individual investor. Here is a list of online brokers who’ve dropped trading fees, and find out how this is possible.
Last month I was selling 1000 shares of a stock and I got a trade notification for a measly 20 shares. This is known as a partial fill. A partial fill occurs when you put in an order to buy or sell a stock and your brokerage can’t fulfill the entire order because there was insufficient shares at a particular price.
It is easy for a newbie investor to get overloaded by all the options that you need to think about when placing their first order. You are faced with things like market orders, limit orders, time-in-force, and more that you need to think about when all you want to do is buy a few shares of Starbucks.