In my previous article about the effect of the Coronavirus outbreak on the stock market, I’ve outlined some general guidance on how to pick stocks to invest and in what quantities. For me, the baseline investment around $1000 turned out to work out quite well on its own. Let’s convert that into the number of shares using only a single point-in-time snapshot today, 2020-03-02.
$200 for 1/1x investment
AAL: American Airlines, 1/1x = $200.000
DAL: Delta Air Lines, 1/1x = $200.000
LUV: Southwest Airlines, 1/1.3x = $153.846
UAL: United Airlines, 1/1.3x = $153.846
ACDVF: Air Canada, 1/4x = $50.000 (OTC market)
ALK: Alaska Air Group, 1/4x = $50.000
JBLU: JetBlue Airways, 1/4x = $50.000
SAVE: Spirit Airlines, 1/6x = $33.333
ALGT: Allegiant Travel Co., 1/12x = $16.667
HA: Hawaiian Holdings Inc., 1/20x = $10.000
Total $917.692
Now, dollars to shares:
AAL: $18.86/share: 10.604 shares
DAL: $47.16/share: 4.241 shares
LUV: $46.95/share: 3.277 shares
UAL: $61.26/share: 2.511 shares
ACDVF: $25.99/share: 1.924 shares (OTC market)
ALK: $50.03/share: 0.999 shares
JBLU: $15.57/share: 3.211 shares
SAVE: $27.27/share: 1.222 shares
ALGT: $137.43/share: 0.121 shares
HA: $19.97/share: 0.501 shares
Okay, so the last two on this list… they round to zero at a $1000 total investment target. With the exception of ALK, I will uniformly truncate (i.e. round down) when converting dollars to a whole number of shares. Then that leaves you with a few dollars to spare… which I’ve found works well for thinking about the possibility: If you only have a few dollars to invest and therefore only limited options to choose, which option will you pick?