Etrade ran a deal last month -- open a new account and get 100 free trades. So I opened a new Etrade account just for the purpose of testing this strategy. My "regular" Etrade commission rate is $9.99 a trade, regardless of size. Without the free commissions deal, I probably would have put $500 each into just 20 companies - a 2% load, 4% round trip.

In any case $10K is about all I care to bet on this kind of a crapshot, and yes, I really did this and it's real money. And yes it was only $200 per company -- a true micro-sized micro-cap mutual fund. It's now three weeks later and I still can't tell you what business some of my "investments" are in, but hey, at $200 each, So what? BTW, I'm already learning a lot about a fairly select group of microcaps, two of which I already added to my regular portfolio (NTRZ and HTRN) with a lot more than $200 ea. BTW, the deal with my son is that we sell nothing out of the crapshot portfolio for one year, then assess.