Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Profiting off $0.01 changes in real life?
You can certainly try to do this, but it's risky and very expensive. Consider a simplified example. You buy 1000 shares of ABC at $1.00 each, with the intention of selling them all when the price reaches $1.01. Rinse and repeat, right? You might think the example above will net you a tidy $10 profit. But you have to factor in trade commissions. Most brokerages are going to charge you per trade. Fidelity for example, want $4.95 per trade; that's for both the buying and the selling. So your 1000 shares actually cost you $1004.95, and then when you sell them for $1.01 each, they take their $4.95 fee again, leaving you with a measly $1.10 in profit. Meanwhile, your entire $1000 stake was at risk of never making ANY profit - you may have been unlucky enough to buy at the stock's peak price before a slow (or even fast) decline towards eventual bankruptcy.  The other problem with this is that you need a stock that is both stable and volatile at the same time. You need the volatility to ensure the price keeps swinging between your buy and sell thresholds, over and over again. You need stability to ensure it doesn't move well away from those thresholds altogether. If it doesn't have this weird stable-volatility thing, then you are shooting yourself in the foot by not holding the stock for longer: why sell for $1.01 if it goes up to $1.10 ten minutes later? Why buy for $1.00 when it keeps dropping to $0.95 ten minutes later? Your strategy means you are always taking the smallest possible profit, for the same amount of risk. Another method might be to only trade each stock once, and hope that you never pick a loser. Perhaps look for something that has been steadily climbing in price, buy, make your tiny profit, then move on to the next company. However you still have the risk of buying something at it's peak price and being in for an awfully long wait before you can cash out (if ever). And if all that wasn't enough to put you off, brokerages have special rules for "frequent traders" that just make it all the more complicated. Not worth the hassle IMO.