Some neophyte no-nos, and: How to fix them?!

[Donaldcels]

This long post will make more sense to you if you're a Sharebuilder user, but hopefully you can help me out even if not.
I'll provide details below, but the super-short summary is:
"Crap, I bought too diverse a group of stocks with too little money up front, and am now drowning in trade fees -- what do I do?!"

Background
I recently decided to invest in stocks for the first time.
I opened a Sharebuilder account with the Advantage pricing program, and through promos I received a bonus $50 in my account and 20 free automatic trades for my first month.

Basically, I wanted to put some money away for mid-January.
I figured over the next few months, I'd try to put away between $700-$1000. I was afraid I'd spend the money in a standard savings account (too liquid) but didn't want to use a Certificate account or anything in case of emergency.
I thought I could learn the basics of trading stocks while putting away money, counting on most of it to be there when I "cash out" in January. I assumed there would be some risk, but I figured if I played it safe, I couldn't do _too_ bad and it'd be better than potentially blowing the money on bar tabs (which might happen if I just leave it in a plain ol' savings account).

[Donaldmn]

I got off to a bad start, getting itchy while my Automatic Investment Plan waited to kick in.
I bought 1 share of a $40 stock NOT as part of the Automatic Investment Plan (for which I had 20 free credits). There's $8 in fees -- and another $8 if I want to sell it and "cash out," right?
I then bought 2 shares each of: a $6 stock, a $7 stock, and another $6 stock.
So, I'm up to $78 invested, but with $32 in fees -- $64 in fees if I wanna sell it in January and get my money back. Than means I need to make an 82% gain on these 7 shares in four months if I want to break even! Yeah, right!

There's more, though.

Realizing this whole fee-to-investment ratio problem, I bought 15 shares of a $6 stock that I felt especially confident would have short-term growth potential.
By my math that stock needs to make $0.94 per share (or grow 16%) in four months for me to break even. (I'm terrible with numbers. If you see errors in my math, please say so.)
Total ratio now: $168 invested. $80 in fees if I wanna sell it all off come January. At this rate, my shares need to collectively grow 48% in four months.

[Dorirael]

Now comes my goof with how the AIP works.
(Basically, you can create a big multi-trade order and even buy partial shares, and it executes automatically as often as every Tuesday. Potential to pay no fees or just $1 per stock when buying using AIP.)

All this time I thought it was like a build-my-own-mutual-fund or something, where I could assemble a bunch of stocks, tweak my allocations, and just sell them off in one go.
Now I see that's too good to be true. (Right?)

Anyway.
I had 20 free AIP credits.
I chose 19 stocks.
They were all purchased for free (yay!). I only had $180 more to invest for now, though, so I spread the $180 out among the 19 stocks in a way I thought looked good.

Here's the big goof. I had two erroneous conceptions of how the AIP works:


I thought I could reallocate the way the dollars are divided among my 19 stocks as an "automatic trade" -- so, I thought every new month I could just use 12 new free AIP credits to tweak the distribution among my AIP stocks.
I thought selling an AIP stock counted as an "automatic trade" -- thereby thinking that after a few months of tweaking, come January I'd have 12 free sells and more at just $1 per sell.

[Douglastype]

So, if my assumptions so far are all correct:
I've got $340 invested, with at least $232 in fees if I want to sell it off (5 stocks purchased at $8 each, 19 stocks purchased for free, and 24 stocks sold at $8 each -- or, 29*$8).
To get all of my original investment back, my stocks need to grow 68% in four months?! (Assuming I don't choose a stock or two and buy several new shares.)

Now what?!
So, NOW what do I do?!

[admin]

Commission fees are definitely a problem for small investors. Obviously you now see that. Ultimately your problem is that $750 just isn't enough to play this game.