How to Buy Partial Shares of Stock (3 Steps)

Analyze your investment objectives and risk tolerance before you start researching companies that offer direct investment plans. Once you know the kind of stocks that are appropriate for your portfolio, look for companies that offer a direct stock purchase plan. Contact each company's investor relations department and request a plan prospectus and any other company disclosure statements that are available. Read this information carefully to ensure that you understand the plan's provisions, and select a company to trade with.
Open an account with the selected company's plan administrator. Complete a new account application if required, which will ask for some personal information, such as your name, address, contact information, and Social Security number. Some plans allow you to set up a regular, automatic investment plan that drafts a pre-determined checking or savings account. You'll be able to choose whether you want your dividends to be automatically reinvested into additional company shares or to be paid to you in cash, or whether you want a combination of the two.
Deposit the money for your purchase. When you first set up your account you might have to pay an application fee, set-up fee, or new account fee along with the amount of your initial purchase. Rather than purchasing a fixed number of shares of company stock, you'll be contributing a fixed dollar amount. The plan administrator will pool your money with money from all of the other plan participants and purchase company stock in one transaction. The plan administrator will divide the shares among each of the plan participants on a pro rata basis, which will likely result in both whole and partial shares credited to your account.

How to Calculate Stock Target Prices

Determine the company's estimated earnings. The basis of any stock target price is the earnings of the underlying company, as this number plugs directly into the calculation for estimating stock prices. Earnings-per-share estimates for all companies, particularly for actively-traded companies, are easy to find in the financial news media. If you cannot find estimated earnings online, on television or in the financial press, you can always call the company's investor-relations department. It will be happy to provide you with a summary of analysts' earnings estimates for the company.
Find the average industry earnings multiple. An earnings multiple, also known as a 'price-earnings ratio,' roughly translates to how much investors are willing to pay for each dollar of earnings for a company. Popular, high-growth stocks, such as technology stocks, often sell for high earnings multiples, as investors anticipate higher earnings returns for their money. On the contrary, low-growth stocks such as utilities often carry low earnings multiples, as there is little chance of dramatic growth in earnings at such predictable companies.Usually, stocks within a defined industry trade at a fairly similar earnings multiple. As with company earnings estimates, average industry price-earnings ratios are available in the financial news media and from investor-relations departments.
Adjust the multiple based on your analysis. Although companies in an industry tend to trade at roughly the same multiple, some trade at premiums to the average, while others trade below. Based on your analysis of a company's earnings growth rate, management team, new product pipeline, and consistency of results, you should adjust your estimated earnings multiple for a company slightly upward or downward, to reflect its position relative to its industry peers.
Multiply the company's projected earnings by your estimated multiple. The earnings-per-share estimate times your adjusted multiple will equal your stock target price. For example, if a company is estimated to earn $2 per share and you estimate its earnings multiple at 20, then your stock target price is $40 per share.