A new way of stock-market wagering is taking hold among younger investors who prefer to think about how much they can spend instead of how many shares they can afford.
4 min
Purchasing a piece of Apple or Tesla once meant calculating how many shares you could afford to buy. That no longer matters. Now you can pay whatever you’re willing to spend, even if that amounts to pocket change.
Thinking primarily about dollars instead of shares represents a dramatic shift in the world of personal finance, posing new opportunities and risks for investors. The practice is gaining momentum thanks to the widespread adoption of fractional trading—which allows investors to purchase slivers of traditional shares—as well as an industry push to reduce online trading fees to zero.
These twin developments made it easier and more cost-effective for new investors to wager as little as $1 on stocks. The volatility of the coronavirus pandemic then turbocharged these bets as market leaders like Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc. soared into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. The S&P 500, meanwhile, is up 73% since its intraday low point in March 2020.
The lineup of wealth managers catering to dollar-focused investors is spreading from upstart online brokerages that rely on flashy apps to industry stalwarts that have longstanding bricks-and-mortar offices around the U.S. One of those giants, Fidelity Investments, launched a service early in 2020 called Stocks by the Slice allowing investors to purchase fractional shares for the first time. When Stocks by the Slice launched last February, 75% of the buy trades from investors using the service were in dollars on average. This month Fidelity now says that figure is closer to 85%.
In the future “retail investors will be thinking 100% in dollars, not in shares,” said Scott Ignall, head of Fidelity’s retail brokerage business. “Clients no longer need to use a calculator to figure out how many shares of stock they want to buy.”
Advocates say the dollar-first approach is helping democratise access to the stock market and open the wealth management industry to a new wave of investors. There are also dangers. Some say the strategy could encourage risky speculation that some analysts and academics warn will end with individuals losing money. Thinking in dollars, some worry, will distance new investors from their investments or inhibit their greater understanding of market moves.
“If you give people a smaller sandbox to make mistakes, they’ll still make mistakes,” says Larry Harris, former chief economist for the Securities and Exchange Commission and professor of finance at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “But also when you make mistakes, you can learn at a lesser cost.”
The ability to pay micro amounts and hold fractional shares when purchasing stocks isn’t necessarily new. Investors have long paid little for penny stocks and small-cap stocks, while others have been able to amass portions of shares through dividend-reinvestment plans. What is new is the ability to freely trade partial shares during market hours. Brokers like Fidelity and Robinhood Markets Inc. can now execute fractional orders immediately, much as they execute ordinary orders to trade stocks or exchange-traded funds.
“Surely, people had to think in dollars before,” Mr Harris said. “Now, they just don’t feel the constraints.”
That is the case for James Evans, a 29-year-old bar and night club manager in Manchester, England. When the pandemic hit Manchester, he was furloughed with more time on his hands to think about his personal investing strategy.
Mr Evans uses Trading212, a London-based trading app, to “build his own ETF,” as he puts it, with fractional buys. He said thinking in dollars gives him more freedom to diversify his portfolio and establish a stronger position.
“This has given me a lot more time to look at what I’m doing, as opposed to just kind of winging it,” he said. “The pandemic has kind of helped that, just in a weird way.”
Robinhood, which was founded in 2013, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this shift. Its free app now has 13 million users with a median age of 31. Investors can start investing for as little as $1, but the most commonly-traded amount on Robinhood’s recurring investment feature—which makes investments in dollars—is $10 every week.
Account holders “want to not do the math,” said Madhu Muthukumar, head of product at Robinhood.
Robinhood’s recurring investments option allows users to put a set amount of money toward given investments on a weekly or monthly basis. The company says the feature was in response to users who aren’t day traders but wanted an investment option they could build into their otherwise low-tech financial lives.
Larger rivals are now embracing the same approach. Last June Charles Schwab Corp. launched a fractional-trading program called “Stock Slices” that had nearly 190,000 accounts as of December. Schwab estimates the average Stock Slices user is younger than its average brokerage customer. Their average buy order is $275, according to Schwab, still well below the going stock price of companies like Tesla and Netflix Inc.
“We’re seeing growth across all kinds of clients, but we have seen a lot of growth in our younger user base,” said Fidelity’s Mr. Ignall. “We do think that this new way of investing has definitely contributed to that growth.”
For Mr Evans, the 29-year-old nightclub manager, thinking in dollars as opposed to shares demystifies the process. He employs dollar-cost averaging, a strategy that invests the same amounts of money at regular frequencies over time, to build his portfolio. This strategy makes it easier for novice investors to set up their investments with the amount of money they want to spend—and it is also often the only option available to younger, newer players who don’t have lots of money to invest in the market.
“Especially when you’re dollar cost averaging, it’s a lot harder with whole shares, because if the whole share is quite a lot, you have to make your dollar-cost averaging more spread out,” Mr. Evans said. “If you can’t do fractionals, you have to just buy one share, which could be, you know, $100. Then you have to make sure you time it so that it fits your investing time frame.”
But as Mr Harris points out, all investors should be thinking about dollars in some capacity. Stock prices can go up and down depending on the total value of a company’s equity or the amount of shares left to buy.
Ultimately, Mr Harris said, the best way to purchase stocks is a personal decision for many investors: “Do you feel richer owning the number of shares you own or the dollars you own?”
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Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
