Understanding fractional orders

In this article:

Overview

Fractional orders allow you to instantly buy and sell shares in fractions or decimals. This means that you can trade less than one whole share of a security. Fractional orders aren't available for purchasing cryptocurrencies.

Exception: Fractional orders placed during extended hours or those resulting from dividend reinvestment, recurring investments, and orders under $1 aren't instant.

Wealthsimple executes market fractional orders by rounding the quantity of each individual fractional order to the nearest whole share using principal liquidity. Your order then immediately fills at market price.

Example

Let’s say you wish to buy 1.3 shares of AAPL.
  • Wealthsimple rounds the quantity of your order to 2 shares by adding 0.7 shares of principal liquidity to the order.
  • You receive an immediate fill on their order of 1.3 shares of AAPL.

Supported order types

You can only place fractional orders as market orders. We don’t currently support fractional trading for other order types.

How to buy and sell fractional shares

You can follow the steps to buy or sell a stock or ETF. Simply enter how many fractional shares you want to buy or sell in the order steps. Buy and sell orders for fractional shares must be greater than or equal to $1.00.

Note: New symbols aren't instantly available for trading. Orders for new symbols still take time to be approved and execute. This means your order may be batched and execute multiple times throughout the day instead of instantly.

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Understanding order types

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