The Lemon Fool

Hi FOlks,
At the risk of asking an obvious question...
When I buy shares they are in whole number quantities. If I invest £100 I get a whole number of shares and some change.
Index trackers, ETFs and Investment Trusts, can be priced £800+ which is a lot of dosh per unit. Am I right in thinking that if you invest, say £100, you get a proportion of a unit, so in this example 0.125 of a unit (ignore rounding, fees etc).

Ray.

Etfs are like shares, you buy integer numbers. I think funds allow fractional purchases, but I generally avoid them because of higher broker fees

A few platforms allow you to hold fractional shares (in ETFs or whatever), but you'll need to check they explicitly say that - they'll have to do it by holding them for several people centrally and then dividing up the entitlement internally (which of course may leave the platform holding fractions of each share with no customer for it, which is why many would rather not do this).

Not many ITs have share prices that high, but many ETFs can be over £30, so if you just want to invest £100, you would probably have a significant fraction left over. If that's what you want, look for index tracking funds and a platform that won't be too expensive for the amount you want to invest.