Fractional Share Trading at Fidelity

I've been a Fidelity customer for a long time. I've also been looking/hoping for a broker to offer fractional share trading with limit orders. Until today, I didn't know that being a Fidelity customer and having that wish are not mutually exclusive.

Although it isn't offered (yet?) on Fidelity's website, fractional share trading has arrived to Fidelity's mobile app. I'm not sure when this happened, as I don't trade as often as I used to, but this morning I noticed a little banner in the trade screen that said "NEW Fractional trading available in Quick Ticket."

I clicked on Quick Ticket and was presented an option to trade in either shares or dollars. Much to my delight, there was also an order type button for market and limit.

As a quick test, I was able to order $10 worth of AMZN at a limit of $1,979.44. The order was filled at $1,976.66, so I ended up buying 0.005 shares of AMZN for a total outlay of $9.88.

After a minute of experimentation, I found out that the minimum order depends on the share price of whatever you are buying. Fidelity's error message says, "Orders with a quantity amount in dollars must convert to a minimum of 0.001 shares. That means the minimum AMZN purchase in dollars, at the share price I ended up paying, was $1.98. As another example, with AT&T trading at $36.66 per share as I write this, I can use Fidelity's app to purchase 4 cents worth of AT&T stock!

That is really fine granularity and makes me very happy because you can put pretty much all available cash to use in most situations.

I wish I'd known about this before I opened a Schwab account (to wait for a similar feature later in the year, no less) to move the Dividend Portfolio from M1.

Apart from the 0.001 share and having to use the mobile app limitations, the fractional trading feature only takes day orders. There's no "good till canceled," "fill or kill," extended hours, and so on. Perhaps these will be added as time goes on.

At the time of writing, it looks like the only other brokers that have implemented a fractional trading service with limit orders are Interactive Brokers and Robinhood. I don't have an Interactive Brokers account, so I don't know how they did it. I have a Robinhood account, but I am still in line for fractional trading.

Thank you Fidelity!