Are you interested in daytrading or buying and holding for long term investments?
If you are interested in long term, I'd suggest a Dividend Reinvestment Program.
I do this with US Bank (and from that I have bought other stuff). If you goto their site:
U.S. Bank - Personal banking including checking accounts, online banking and much more and click on shareholder information then in there somewhere there is a link to melloninvestor. At melloninvestor you can set up an account and set up for all dividends to buy more stock (you don't have to do us bank, but usbank waives the most fees. I like the investment in usbank becasue they are big-time advertising toward spanish speaking and there is a market for it. They advertise it more than any other bank. If you join the program, most of the fees are waived). If you put your $500.00 toward a lower priced stock like $10.00 a share you'd get 50 shares. Each quarter the company declares a dividend say 0.05 a share. So each quarter you would get $2.5 or 0.25 shares. at the end of year 1 you'd get one share "free"
If you go there you can pick from 100s of companies and the fees vary. The best one I found was US Bank. Almost all of the fees are waived.
Just my two cents. If you want day-trading or the ability to sell whenever you want this is not the right program. You have to read the fine print becasue it will say all stocks are bought on the 2nd tuesday of every month (for smaller companies) or on Tuesdays at 3 pm the stocks are bought (for bigger companies)
Horfin