Never split up your trades. Commissions are charged per trade. You'll bleed your own gains thin because of the increased commissions.
Plus, 1,000 shares isn't a big sum of shares at all. Investors can get orders of 10,000 or more filled instantly, in full, for most stocks. Generally, as long as a company has at least 200k volume per day, it should be fine.
If you're concerned of your order not being sold in full because of the stock being slow, you can opt for an AON option on your trade (all-or-nothing), as long as the brokerage supports it. Otherwise, you can sell at below the bid price, or do a market order.
No problem.
To use your example, during the past 90 days, Ford's trading volume has averaged 27.6 million shares a day. See https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch... That sort of volume makes it very easy to accommodate orders of 1,000 shares.
Other big companies have similarly large volumes. Bank of America: 77.5 million. Apple: 62.0 million. General Electric: 28.3 million. General Motors: 16.6 million.
On top of that, certain firms serve as "market makers"--buying and selling shares of stock to maintain liquidity in the market.
Further, you don't have to worry about whether your stock is being sold in one lot, or two, or three. That's what Scottrade handles.
Bottom line: You just place your buy or sell order. Scottrade will take care of the mechanics. And almost certainly, behind the scenes, your sale won't be split up.
Hope that helps.
Quotes also contain information about size available. For Ford as I write this:
Bid: 16.83 x 13,300
Ask: 16.84 x 37,500
That means that you could buy at least 13,300 shares at the BUY price, or sell over 37,000 at the ASK price. For a stock as liquid as Ford, your 1000 shares is a small quantity and could be sold immediately with no difficulty.
In less liquid stocks (and especially crap penny stocks), it might be impossible to sell (no buyers).
See if Scottrade provides Level 2 quotes. That would allow you to see more of the order depth on both the buy and sell side.
It depends on the bid.
If the only guy who wants to buy at $15.05 wants to buy 5,000 shares, then it would be easy to sell him 1,000 of yours at $15.05.
If he only wants 100, then your sell order might be partially filled, while the rest has to wait for another buyer.
I recently opened a Scottrade account and am beginning to buy/sell stocks on my own. I have a question about the difficulty of selling stocks of a certain lot size. Say Ford's Bid price is $15.05 and Ask is $15.07 and I own 1000 shares of Ford stock. I understand that it would be pretty easy to execute a sell order of 10 shares for $15.05 but how difficult would it be to execute a sell order of 100 or even 1000 shares for $15.05? Would you have to sell them in several different orders of say 20 each to get them all to execute that day or would your order still most likely execute with just putting in one sell order for 1000 shares?
