I know a couple of people that did just that. With the lowered barrier to entry (free), people have been able to buy say a single share per paycheck instead of having to hold on for months to get a cost effective amount of cash to make it worth the trade. Not only this, but you can effectively dollar cost average your way into the market to minimize losing to bad timing. The trade fees were always absolute and not a percentage so it just never accessible to a lot of people -- and now, a lot of the big discount brokers went to 0-1¢ fees.