Here's an update for my paper trading account that I started on Webull last week. I ended up buying about $1,000 each of the 17 stocks I had picked with a price to book under 1. So far the account appears to be down $10.74. I'm already seeing a couple of potential adjustments to make.
When I set up the transactions last week, I was able to indicate a dollar amount that I wanted to buy, but Webull (at least in the paper trading account) doesn't appear to allow trading of partial shares. So they rounded down my purchases and I only ended up buying $16,696.95 worth of stock. My $10.74 drop represents just a 0.06% drop in that purchase.
Because the paper trading account starts with $1M, I think that when I do my usual rebalancing in mid November, I'll use the whole $1M give or take whatever gains or losses happen over the next 6 weeks or so. This should have a couple of advantages.
$1M/17=$58,823.53
If I'm looking at buying tens of thousands worth of each stock instead of one thousand, the rounding errors of buying or selling only whole shares will be much smaller and I can better approximate an even split for the stocks in my portfolio.
In the last couple of full quarters where I started tracking my price to book list there was more than a 10% gain per quarter. If I see gains like that again, it will show up as a $100K gain in a $1M portfolio. Those sort of numbers will be a bit more attention grabbing and I may be able to get more people interested or involved in my project.
The other change that I plan to make when I rebalance in a few weeks is to leave ARE out of my portfolio. I think it's a solid company with potential similar to the other companies on this list, but if I start buying these companies with real money, it's a REIT and I don't want to deal with the headache of those extra tax hoops to jump through.
In any case. Thanks to any of you who read this far. Thanks to all who left upvotes. Let me know if you have any input. I would love to see this become a collaborative forum.