CHAPTER 17

Brokerage Firms: Take My Order, Please

 

When you are ready to start adding shares of stock or individual bonds to your portfolio, how do you actually buy them? It’s not as if you can just walk into a supermarket or department store, go to their “stock” department, pick out what you want and head for the nearest cashier, right? In some ways, the actual method of buying shares is not so dissimilar from the way you purchase other merchandise. While goods are bought and sold through stores, the buying and selling of stocks and bonds is typically facilitated by brokers through brokerage firms. In this chapter, we will be looking at what a broker is, how to select one, and how they purchase and sell securities for you.

Quite simply, a broker ...

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