E*Trade commission
The commission is per trade, there is likely a different commission based on the type of security you're trading, stock, options, bonds, over the internet, on the phone, etc.  It's not likely that they charge an account maintenance fee, but without knowing what kind of account you have it's hard to say. What you may be referring to is a fund expense ratio.  Most (all...) mutual funds and exchange traded funds will charge some sort of expense costs to you, this is usually expressed as a percent of your holdings.  An index fund like Vanguard's S&P 500 index, ticker VOO, has a small 0.05% expense ratio. Most brokers will have a set of funds that you can trade with no commission, though there will still be an expense fee charged by the fund. Read over the E*Trade fee schedule carefully.
"Check your math... ""two stocks, both with a P/E of 2 trading at $40 per share lets say, and one has an EPS of 5 whereas the other has an EPS of 10 is the latter a better purchase?"" If a stock has P/E of 2 and  price of $40 it has an EPS of $20. Not $10. Not $5." I like your enthusiasm and initiative. However, there are a few things you need to consider that you haven't yet thought about. First, it is important to remember that trading with fake money is not the same as trading with real money.  In the fake world, you have $100k.  With this fake money, you can do reckless things with it, such as put it all on one stock.  If you lose, it costs you nothing, so you don't have an emotional attachment to it.  With real money, it will feel different, and that is something you haven't experienced yet. Second, you mentioned that you are good at making picks.  With all due respect, I suggest that you aren't old enough to make that determination.  You haven't been trading for long enough to determine if you are doing well at it.  :)  That having been said, I don't want to completely discourage you from trying something new. Third, you mentioned long-term investing, but you also said that you need to make your money back quick and mentioned trading daily.  Those things aren't really compatible.  I wouldn't consider what you are doing as long-term investing.  With the type of investing you are doing, picking individual stocks and hoping for the value to go up in a relatively short time-frame, it is similar to gambling.  The risk of losing is very much there, and you shouldn't be investing money this way that you aren't prepared to lose.  If you need the money for something soon, don't put it in the stock market. Never forget this.  What can happen is that you start with small amounts of money, do well, and then, thinking that you are good at this, put in larger amounts of money.  You will eventually lose.  If you put in money that you need for something else, you have a problem. If you are trying this out for education and entertainment purposes, that is great.  But when it starts to get serious, make sure that you are aware of the risks.  Educate yourself and be smart. Here is what I would suggest: If you want to try this short-term day-trading type investing, and you understand that the money can easily be lost, I would balance that with investing in a more traditional way: Set aside an amount each month to put in a low-expense index mutual fund.  Doing this will have several benefits for you:  As for your specific questions about stock trading with small amounts: Yes, you can trade with small amounts; however, every time you trade, you will be paying a commission.  Even with a discount broker, if you are trading frequently, the commissions you will be paying will be very significant at the dollar amounts you are talking about.  The only way I can see around this would be to try the Robinhood app, which allows you to trade without paying sales commission.  I have no experience with that app. While theoretically it works it's not a realistic trade because of market efficiency. It's realistic for brokers to advertise trades like this so they can earn more customers and commission. These sorts of trades will be priced in to highly liquid big ticket names like KO and the vast majority of the market. The possibility exists with small names with less liquidity, less trading volume; however, the very execution of this trade will alter the behavior of impending traders thus minimizing any potential profits. You'd need millions of dollars to trade the number of shares it would take to profit from these penny variations.  What you bring up here is the way high frequency firms front-run trades and profit on these pennies. Say you have a trade commission of $5.  Every time you buy you pay $5, every time you sell you pay $5.  So you need a gain in excess of $10, a 10% gain on $100.  Now if you wanted to trade on a penny movement from $100 to $100.01, you need to have bought 1,000 shares totaling $100,000 for the $0.01 price movement to cover your commission costs.  If you had $1,000,000 to put at risk, that $0.01 price movement would net you $90 after commission, $10,000,000 would have made you $990.  You need much larger gains at the retail level because commissions will equate to a significant percentage of the money you're investing. Very large trading entities have much different arrangements and costs with the exchanges.  They might not pay a fee on each transaction but something that more closely resembles a subscription fee, and costs something that more closely resembles a house. Now to your point, catching these price movements and profiting.  The way high frequency trading firms purportedly make money relates to having a very low latency network connection to a particular exchange.  Their very low latency/very fast network connection lets them see orders and transact orders before other parties.   Say some stock has an ask at $101 x 1,000 shares.  The next depth is $101.10.  You see a market buy order come in for 1,000 shares and place a buy order for 1,000 shares at $101 which hits the exchange first, then immediately place a sell order at $101.09, changing the ask from $101.00 to $101.09 and selling in to the market order for a gain of $0.09 per share. "Members of the Federal Reserve System keep track of what money a bank has (if it's not in the vault), who owns what shares of stock, who owns what bond, etc. The part of the Federal Reserve System that tracks stock ownership is the Depository Trust Company (DTC). They have a group of subsidiaries that settle various types of security transactions. DTC is a member of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, a limited-purpose   trust company under New York State banking law and a registered   clearing agency with the Securities and Exchange Commission. There's lots of information on their website describing this process. DTCC's subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC), established in   1973, was created to reduce costs and provide clearing and settlement   efficiencies by immobilizing securities and making ""book-entry""   changes to ownership of the securities. DTC provides securities   movements for NSCC's net settlements1, and settlement for institutional   trades (which typically involve money and securities transfers between   custodian banks and broker/dealers), as well as money market   instruments. Black pools are trades done where the price is not shared with the market. But the DTC is the one who keeps track of who owns which shares. They have records of all net transactions2. The DTC is the counterparty for transactions. When stock moves from one entity to another the DTC is involved. As the central counterparty for the nation's major exchanges and   markets, DTCC clears and settles virtually all broker-to-broker equity 1. This is the link that shows that settlements are reported on a ""net basis"". 2. If broker A sells 1000 shares of something to broker B at 8 and then five minutes later broker B sells the 1000 shares back to A, you cannot be sure that that total volume will be recorded. No net trading took place and there would be fees to pay for no reason if they reported both trades. Note: In dark pool trading quite often the two parties don't know each other. For shares (book-keeping records) to be exchanged it has to be done through a Clearing House." "You can infer some of the answers to your questions from the BATS exchange's market data page and its associated help page.  (I'm pretty sure a page like this exists on each stock exchange's website; BATS just happens to be the one I'm used to looking at.) The Matched Volume section refers to all trades on a given date that took place on ""lit"" exchanges; that is, where a public protected US stock exchange's matching engine helped a buyer and a seller find each other.  Because there are exactly 11 such exchanges in existence, it's easy to show 100% of the matched volume broken down into 11 rows. The FINRA & TRF Volume section refers to all trades on a given date that took place on ""non-lit"" exchanges.  These types of trades include dark pool volume and any other trade that is not required to take place in public but is required to be reported (the R in TRF) to FINRA.  There are three venues via which these trades may be reported to FINRA -- NASDAQ's, NYSE's, and FINRA's own ADF.  They're all operated under the purview of FINRA, so the fact that they're ""located at"" NASDAQ or NYSE is a red herring.  (For example, from the volume data it's clear that the NASDAQ facility does not only handle NASDAQ-listed (Tape C) securities, nor does the NYSE facility only handle NYSE-listed (Tape A) securities or anything like that.) The number of institutions reporting to each of the TRFs is large -- many more than the 11 public exchanges -- so the TRF data is not broken down further.  (Also I think the whole point of the TRFs is to report in secret.)  I don't know enough details to say why the NASDTRF has always handled more reporting volume than the other two facilities.  Of course, since we can't see inside the TRF reporting anyway, it's sort of a moot point." Foodex Trade Ltd is the United Kingdom based Exporter and importer provider. We are connected to a portion of the conspicuous providers and merchants in the food and drink industry. Our principle item is sunflower oil, which used to make the many sorts of sustenance. Which gives a wide assortment of items according to our client's demand. We give, the more kind of sustenance item and refreshment item our client's demand. This isn't a joke. Tons of people in sales and trading used it.  Fuck Bloomberg chat. The joke for bchat was the bell.   This is how Goldman got in trouble for calling people muppets. I nearly shit myself when that came out because I knew compliance would be looking through chats for the word and my group of friends called each muppets all the time.  Weird convos with compliance happened shortly after when you had to have your buddy write an email to compliance saying it wasn't insulting to them.