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Starting with $1,000

What a book of about a thousand dollars looks like here. The core is bought in fractions of a share, a handful of picks fit beside it, every order is sized in dollars, and the limits follow the size of the book on their own.

Who it is for
New to Bellwether
Reading time
5 min read
Updated

You can start a book with $1,000. Nothing about the desk changes for a small book: the same roles read the market, the same code checks every order, the same stops guard every position. What changes is the arithmetic, and the platform does that arithmetic for you from the size of your account. This page says what to expect.

Smallest position the desk opens
$25
A typical first buy on Moderate
about $30 to $95 per name
Core index funds at $1,000 (Moderate)
three, about $90 each, bought as fractions of a share
Picks beside the core at $1,000 (Moderate)
up to 5
Largest single order at this size
$200
Orders a day at this size
4
Trading halts for the day after losing
$50
Day-trade guard
on for every book under $25,000

Orders are sized in dollars and sent as fractions of a share

The PM decides in dollars ("$90 of SPY"), and the code turns that into shares at the price of the order. A $90 order for a fund that trades at $560 a share becomes 0.1607 of a share; you will see quantities like that on Portfolio, in the Inbox and on every fill, always with the dollar figure first. Your broker has to allow fractional shares for this to work. Alpaca does for most listed stocks and funds; a name that only trades in whole shares is bought as one whole share when one fits inside your limits, and skipped with a sentence saying why when it does not.

NoteA fraction of a share is protected exactly like a whole one. The arms its stop for the exact quantity you hold, and it also rests a stop order at the broker as a backstop. Alpaca only accepts fractional stop orders for the current day, so that broker-side backstop is placed again each morning; the Executor's own stop watches the position the whole time.

What the book holds

On the default , Moderate, about a third of a $1,000 book goes into a core of three broad index funds, roughly $90 each, and the desk may add up to five picks of its own beside them, each starting around $30 and never larger than $100 (a tenth of the book). That is at most eight names. A calmer posture holds fewer and smaller picks and more of the core in short-term Treasury and bond funds; a bolder one holds larger picks. Strategy › Profile › Posture shows the split for your posture, and Strategy › Allocation lets you move the core share if you want more or less of the book in index funds.

Two rules keep a small book from filling up with positions too small to matter:

  • No new position under $25. If the desk's sizing for a new name lands under $25 (on a nervous day it halves its starters, and half of a small starter can fall under the line), it does not open the position and says so in plain words. It can still add to a name you already hold, and it can always sell.
  • A cap on how many picks fit, on books under $10,000. The dollars your posture leaves for picks, divided by the size of a starter, is the most picks a small book holds at once (five on a $1,000 Moderate book). When the book is at that number the desk adds to what it holds or exits something first. From $10,000 up there is no count: the posture's own style ("about four to eight names" on Moderate) and the dollars set aside for picks decide, as they do for any book.

Both follow from the size of the book, your posture and your allocation. There is nothing to set. The $25 line stops mattering once your starters are well above it, and the count of picks applies only while the book is under $10,000.

The limits follow the size of the book

The largest single order, the number of orders a day and the loss that halts trading for the day all scale with your equity, so a $1,000 book cannot place a $1,000 order by mistake (the one exception is the Speculative posture, which you unlock by typing an and whose limits are the whole book, one order included). At $1,000 that is $200 an order, four orders a day and a $50 ; at $5,000 it is $500, six and $150. You can see the figures in force for your book on Risk › Limits, with a note where the size of the account set them. You can always make a limit stricter; loosening one asks for your and stays inside what the account size allows on every posture but Speculative.

WatchWith four orders a day at $1,000, the day the desk builds the three-fund core leaves room for one more order. The rest of its ideas wait for the next session, and it says so rather than dropping them.

The day-trade rule applies

Every account under $25,000 at a US broker is subject to the pattern-day-trader rule on margin accounts: no more than three same-day round trips in five trading days. The Executor counts them itself and refuses an order that would be the fourth, whatever the size of the position. This desk rarely day-trades on purpose (it holds for days to weeks), so you will mostly meet this rule if you sell something yourself on the day it was bought. A cash account is exempt from that rule and lives under the settled-cash rule instead; the Executor enforces whichever applies to your account.

What it costs to run

The model time your desk uses is metered per book; the Overview shows today's AI cost, and the adds it up as a share of the book a year. Reading that every book needs (the shared morning market read, for example) is done once for everybody and counted as the platform's cost, not your book's. On a there is nothing to pay either way.

Getting started

  1. Create the book and connect your broker on Connect. Paper trading is the default and is all that is offered today.
  2. Leave the posture on Moderate unless you have a reason; you can change it later and the book re-shapes itself over the next sessions.
  3. The first plan arrives within minutes and, on Manual, its orders wait for you in the Inbox. How do I get it to trade? has the four ways to make the first order happen sooner.