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Denis Gorbunov's avatar

Thanks for the math, Shailesh. Numbers don't lie. However, I wouldn't recommend anyone to believe they can buy and sell (any) assets for free. With stocks in particular, Payment for Order Flow leads you to buy stocks at a higher price. So the broker doesn't need to show the fee. It's still there, though.

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Shailesh Kumar, MBA's avatar

That is a great point. You can overcome this to a large extent by setting a threshold drift. Many mutual funds use a threshold of 5% drift from the target allocation before rebalancing. For liquid stocks, the spread should be much less than 5%. This will also reduce the frequency of rebalancing.

It is a pretty standard advice to rebalance your portfolio on a quarterly or annual basis. The goal is to reduce risk but rebalancing also has this performance boosting benefit. There have been studies showing more frequent rebalancing is better than less but sure there are some natural limits to how frequent you can do this.

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Denis Gorbunov's avatar

I use buy-stop-limit orders to "tell" the broker in which price window they're allowed to execute transactions for me. If I don't do that, they'll certainly cash in on my naivety.

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Shailesh Kumar, MBA's avatar

That is a good way to do it, specially if you own small caps or other less liquid stocks

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