Best Stocks Under $20 to Buy Now

Your debts are under control, your emergency fund is fully funded, and you are maxing out your retirement savings.

Your debts are under control, your emergency fund is fully funded, and you are maxing out your retirement savings. And, lucky you, you still have $1,000 left over to invest in stocks. There are options.

You could gain instant exposure to shares of hundreds of companies by plowing the money into a low-cost fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fund such as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (symbol SPY). Simple and cheap. Or, you could buy a single share of a high-priced stock like Amazon.com (AMZN) and you might not even have enough left over to cover your $99 Amazon Prime membership fee. But it’s risky putting all of your eggs in one basket. Another approach is to spread the money over several promising low-priced stocks.

The one wrinkle to buying shares of multiple stocks is trading commissions. Even at just $4.95 per online trade at Fidelity or Schwab, investing in 10 different stocks means your $1,000 investment is already down 5%. A workaround: Open a free Robinhood account and make no-commission trades on your smartphone using the brokerage’s app. (There's a monthly fee to upgrade to a Robinhood Gold premium account.) Here are nine good stocks under $20 to consider for your portfolio.

Data is as of May 2, 2017, unless otherwise indicated. Click on ticker-symbol links for current share prices and more.

Disclaimer

(Stocks are listed in alphabetical order. Dividend yield is calculated based on the last four quarterly dividend payments. Analyst ratings are per Zacks and Thomson Reuters.)

Dan Burrows
Senior Investing Writer, Kiplinger.com

Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the august publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of SmartMoney, MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, InvestorPlace and DailyFinance. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Consumer Reports, Senior Executive and Boston magazine, and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among other publications. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and hosted a weekly video segment on equities.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, funds, macroeconomics, demographics, real estate, cost of living indexes and more.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade stocks or other securities. Rather, he dollar-cost averages into cheap funds and index funds and holds them forever in tax-advantaged accounts.