What to do with small dividends in brokerage account?
Assuming you have no new cash to add to your account as gyurisc has suggested, I wouldn't sweat the small amounts – it doesn't hurt to have a little cash sit idle, even if you want to theoretically be fully invested (the wisdom of doing that, or not, perhaps worthy of another question :-) If you try too hard to invest the small amounts frequently, you're likely to get killed on fees.  My strategy (if you could call it that) is to simply let small amounts accumulate until there's enough to buy more shares without paying too much commission. For instance, I don't like fees to be more than 1% of the shares purchased, so with a $10 commission per trade, I prefer to make minimum $1000 purchases. I used to roll small amounts of cash into a no-load money market fund I could buy without commission, and then purchase shares when I hit the threshold, but even putting the cash in a money market fund isn't worth the hassle today with rates of return from money market funds being close to zero. Don't sit on it, because the money does not work for you. Add more money to it and buy a stock or stocks of the company. Some brokerages will allow you to enroll your account in a dividend reinvestment plan -- TD Ameritrade and I think Schwab for example. The way the plan works is that they would take your $4 and give you whatever fractional share of the ETF it is worth on the payment date. There are no fees associated with this purchase (or at least there are in the programs I've seen -- if you have to pay a fee, look for another brokerage). You may also be able to enroll specific securities instead of the entire account into dividend reinvestment. Call your brokerage to see what they offer.
Small companies need not pay out heft dividends. It makes much more sense to invest it directly in to the company to build  a stronger company and produce future results. For example just say Mike see's a company called Milk Inc.  Milk inc is doing very well and for the last three year's the amount the profits are increasing by has been going up by 10% the company is still small and doesn't do dividends. Mike see's opportunity and snatches up 1000 at 2.20 , He knows this company does not pay dividends. 10 years pass and this company is absolutely booming  profits are still going up the company has decided to start paying hefty dividends as it no longer needs as much money to invest in it's growth. Shares are now valued at 6.80 . Mike banks. Brokerages are supposed to keep your money separate from theirs. So, even if they fail as a company, your money and investments are still there, and can be transferred to another brokerage. It doesn't matter if it's an IRA or taxable account.  Of course, as is the case with MF Global, if illegally take their client's money (i.e., steal), it may be a different story. In such cases, SIPC covers up to $500K, of which $250K can be cash, as JoeTaxpayer said.  You may be interested in the following news item from the SEC. It's about some proposed changes, but to frame the proposal they lay out the way it is now: http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2011/2011-128.htm The most relevant quote:   The Customer Protection Rule (Rule 15c3-3).   This SEC rule requires a   broker-dealer to segregate customer securities and cash from the   firm’s proprietary business activities. If the broker-dealer fails,   these customer assets should be readily available to be returned to   customers. As I recall, the Scottrade minimum is only $500. (By the way, Scottrade has a feature to automatically reinvest any dividends which the securities pay) Once you have an account, you can buy into an index fund.  SPY tracks the S&P 500. It is also currently paying nearly 2% in dividends.  You can shop for other alternatives here: http://seekingalpha.com/insight/etf_hub/etf_guide/selector/article/39431-core-building-blocks-large-mid-small-cap-us-etfs I was going to comment on the commission-free ETF answer, which I agree with, but I don't have enough reputation. TD Ameritrade has a list of commission-free ETFs and has no minimum deposit required to open an account. Another idea is to keep gifts in cash until a certain threshold is reached. For instance, $100 for birthday, $100 for Christmas, $100 for next birthday, $100 for next Christmas, now execute the trade. Sharebuilder has $4 scheduled trades, so you'd be at about 1% overhead for that. If other people give money, you'll reach the threshold faster of course. For what it's worth, I do something similar for my 2 nieces. I combined their account and prepay Christmas plus birthday, so I do 1 trade a year. I have my account at Sharebuilder because my idea predated the commission-free ETFs that are now pretty popular. I should really transfer the account... hm. Theoretically, yes, you can only buy or sell whole shares (which is why you still have .16 shares in your account; you can't sell that fraction on the open market). This is especially true for voting stock; stock which gives you voting rights in company decisions makes each stock one vote, so effectively whomever controls the majority of one stock gets that vote. However, various stock management policies on the part of the shareholder, brokerage firm or the issuing company can result in you owning fractional shares. Perhaps the most common is a retirement account or other forward-planning account. In such situations, it's the dollar amount that counts; when you deposit money you expect the money to be invested in your chosen mix of mutual funds and other instruments. If the whole-shares rule were absolute, and you wanted to own, for instance, Berkshire Hathaway stock, and you were contributing a few hundred a month, it could take you your entire career of your contributions sitting in a money-market account (essentially earning nothing) before you could buy even one share. You are virtually guaranteed in such situations to end up owning fractions of shares in an investment account. In these situations, it's usually the fund manager's firm that actually holds title to the full share (part of a pool they maintain for exactly this situation), and your fractional ownership percentage is handled purely with accounting; they give you your percentage of the dividends when they're paid out, and marginal additional investments increase your actual holdings of the share until you own the whole thing. If you divest, the firm sells the share of which you owned a fraction (or just holds onto it for the next guy fractionally investing in the stock; no need to pay unnecessary broker fees) and pays you that fraction of the sale price.  Another is dividend reinvestment; the company may indicate that instead of paying a cash dividend, they will pay a stock dividend, or you yourself may indicate to the broker that you want your dividends given to you as shares of stock, which the broker will acquire from the market and place in your account. Other common situations include stock splits that aren't X-for-1. Companies often aren't looking to halve their stock price by offering a two-for-one split; they may think a smaller figure like 50% or even smaller is preferable, to fine tune their stock price (and thus P/E ratio and EPS figures) similar to industry competitors or to companies with similar market capitalization. In such situations they can offer a split that's X-for-Y with X>Y, like a 3-for-2, 5-for-3 or similar. These are relatively uncommon, but they do happen; Home Depot's first stock split, in 1987, was a 3-for-2. Other ratios are rare, and MSFT has only ever been split 2-for-1. So, it's most likely that you ended up with the extra sixth of a share through dividend reinvestment or a broker policy allowing fractional-share investment. Split the difference. Max it out, sell half immediately and wait a year or more for the rest. Or keep a third... whatever works for your risk tolerance. A perfectly diversified portfolio with $0 in it is still worth $0. For such a small amount, I really don't think it's worth the time and effort to withdraw it. Why not roll it over into a traditional IRA or a new 401k / 403b? No, the reinvestment is done as a courtesy. Consider, one can have, say, 100 shares of a $50 stock. A 2% dividend is $100/yr or $25/quarter. It would be a pretty bad deal if brokers charged you even $5 for that trade. When cap gains and dividends are grouped as you suggest, it refers to Mutual Funds. My funds will have a year end dividend and cap gain distribution. In a non-retirement account, one has to pay the tax due, and be sure to add this to your cost basis, as it's money you are effectively adding to your account. It does not mean cap gain the same as when you sell your shares of Apple for a huge gain.  Those check boxes seem to offer you a chance to put all your holding on the same reinvestment plan for div/cap gain. You should also be able to choose one by one what you'd like to do. A specific strategy to make money on a potentially moderately decreasing stock price on a dividend paying stock is to write covered calls.  There is a category on Money.SE about covered call writing, but in summary, a covered call is a contract to sell the shares at a set price within a defined time range; you gain a premium (called the time value) which, when I've done it, can be up to an additional 1%-3% return on the position.  With this strategy you're collecting dividends and come out with the best return if the stock price stays in the middle: if the price does not shoot up high enough that your option is called, you still own the stock and made extra return; if the price drops moderately, you may still be positive. The Brokerage firm will purchase shares for the dividend paid in a omnibus account for the security of the issuer and then they will distribute fractional shares among all their clients that chose Div Reinvest.  They will only have to buy 1 extra share to account for the fractional portion of what they allocate.  The structure of the market does not permit trading of fractional shares. There is generally not any impact to the market place for Div Reinvest with the exception of certain securities that pay large dividends that are not liquid. sometimes this occurs in  preferred securities where a large amount of Div reinvestment could create a large market order that has market impact.  Most brokers place market orders for the opening on the day following the payment of the dividend. When you sell the fractional portion same process as full shares are sold into the market and the fractional if traded between you and the brokers omnibus account.  if it creates a full share for the broker (omnibus has .6 shares and you sell him .5 they would likely flip that out to the street with the full share portion of your order. This would not have impact to outstanding shares and all cost are operational and with the broker handling the Div reinvestment service. Many brokerages offer automatic dividend reinvestment. It is very infrequent that these dividends are exactly a whole share. So, if you have signed up for automatic dividend reinvestment, many brokerages will reinvest your dividends and assign to you a fractional share. I can't speak for how these shares work with regards to voting, but I can say that the value of these fractional holdings does change with stock price as if one genuinely could hold a fraction of a share. The problem there is that there's a tax due on that dividend. So, if you wish, you can buy the ETF and specify to reinvest dividends, but you'll have to pay a bit of tax on them, and keep track of your basis, if the account isn't a retirement account. "I believe money market ""funds"" (ie a mutual fund) would pay dividends, and you would get a 1099-DIV. A money market ""account"" however is probably actually a bank account, and you would get a 1099-INT for that. It depends how the broker has set it up. I have one of each with different brokers.  If your ""money market"" statements mention anything about FDIC coverage, it is likely an ""account"" (ie a bank account) and will pay interest, not dividends." If you bought 5 shares @ $20 each that would cost you $100 plus brokerage. Even if your brokerage was only $10 in and out, your shares would have to go up 20% just for you to break even. You don't make a profit until you sell, so just for you to break even your shares need to go up to $24 per share. Because your share holding would be so small the brokerage, even the cheapest around, would end up being a large percentage cost of any overall profits. If instead you had bought 500 shares at $20, being $1000, the $20 brokerage (in and out) only represents 2% instead of 20%. This is called economies of scale. "New SEC rules also now allow brokers to collect fees on non-dividend bearing accounts as an ""ADR Pass-Through Fee"". Since BP (and BP ADR) is not currently paying dividends, this is probably going to be the case here. According to the Schwab brokerage firm, the fee is usually 1-3 cents per share. I did an EDGAR search for BP's documents and came up with too many to read through (due to the oil spill and all of it's related SEC filings) but you can start here: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/q207/adr.html"