$Can I buy fractional shares on Schwab$

Charles Schwab Fractional Shares in 2023

Does Charles Schwab offer buying partial (fractional) shares of expensive stocks such as Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), Amazon (AMZN), Tesla (TSLA), Google (GOOG), or Facebook (FB)?

Can You Buy Fractional Shares on Charles Schwab?

Wouldn’t it be convenient to simply place an order for $100 of Tesla instead of having to buy the stock in increments of whole shares? But the stock market simply doesn’t work that way...or so you thought.

Say Hello to Schwab Stock Slices™

Charles Schwab has launched a fractional-share trading service called Stock Slices™. With a Schwab account, it is now possible to trade a whole-dollar amount instead of a whole-share amount in any of the 500 stocks that make up the S&P index. Other stocks are currently not eligible for fractional-share trading at Schwab, and ETFs are completely off the list.

Details of Schwab Stock Slices

The minimum order amount on a fractional-share trade at Schwab is $5. Schwab also has a maximum of $50,000 per transaction.

If you own less than one share of a stock in your Schwab account that normally pays dividends, you’ll get a fraction of a dividend proportional to the amount of stock you own when the company issues its cash distribution.

Stock splits are handled in a similar fashion. In the case of a 4:1 stock split, if you had 2 whole shares, you would receive 6 additional shares for a total of 8. If you hold 0.50 shares on the same split, you would end up with 2 whole shares.

Schwab’s regular stock commission is $0, and it doesn’t impose any surcharges on fractional-share trades. So one of the great features of the new service is the cost—there is none!

Comparison

It’s nice that Schwab has this service to provide fractional-share trading. But other firms offer more than just 500 securities. At , it’s possible to buy a partial share of ANY stock on the major U.S. exchanges (not to mention every ETF).

You can also invest in partial shares of ALL stocks and ETFs by using a $0-commission brokerage firm called . They offer the best pricing, free stocks to get started, great trading tools, , community of 12 million members, and much more ().

Open Webull Account

Open WeBull Account

Open M1 Finance Account

Fractional Shares at Schwab Don’t Actually Exist

Remember that fractional shares don’t actually exist. Whole-dollar investing is an accounting service that brokers offer their clients. Brokers add up all the partial-share holdings and hold the necessary shares on their own books.

Let’s say five customers hold partial shares in Tesla in this fashion: 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3. The broker holds one whole share on its books to cover the total fractional-share holdings of its customers.

Charles Schwab Fractional Shares

Placing Fractional-Share Trades at Schwab

Schwab has a discrete order ticket for partial-share trades. To find it on the website, click on the Trade tab at the top of the screen and select Schwab Stock Slices™ from the drop-down menu that appears.

On the mobile app, you’ll need to tap on the More icon (with three dots in a row) in the bottom menu and then tap on Stock Slices™ on the new menu.

On either platform, you’ll be presented with the appropriate order form. It’s a little different than the regular trade ticket. With this one, you’ll select the stocks you want to invest in. You can trade up to thirty stocks in a single order. Of course, you can trade just one if you wish.

When you’re finished adding your selections, you’ll get a list with the ability to remove entries or set them up for dividend reinvesting.

At the top of the list is the quantity field. This is where you’ll enter the purchase amount, and of course, it will be a dollar amount instead of a share amount. If you have more than one stock, the dollar amount of the purchase will be divided evenly among the multiple assets. During our testing, we were not able to adjust the percentages (for example, allocating 70% of the capital to one stock and 30% to another).

The order form will display a review page where you can look over the final details, including estimated number of shares for each stock and DRIP preferences.

About the Author

Chad Morris is a financial writer with more than 20 years experience as both an English teacher and an avid trader. When he isn’t writing expert content for Brokerage-Review.com, Chad can usually be found managing his portfolio or building a new home computer.