Since I am a stock-picking genius (sometimes) I decided to buy some Raspberry Pi stock. Mistakes were made. Maybe we can describe a better way to buy it for some other brave gambler. (I am here to learn.)
Raspberry Pi went public about 5 months ago. I would rather they had stayed "pure" but whatever, I guess I'll try to make money on it. Same with how they focused on commercial customers during pandemic shortages...would rather they hadn't but I'll admit it is probably better business. And my final bit of analysis is that a lot of people beat on Raspberry Pi for being kind of expensive on performance/$ basis but I still think they have a good product and ecosystem and innovation pipeline. Seeing the RP2040 chip pop up in many other products is something that makes me go hmmmmmmmm in a good way.
OK, so this stock is traded on the London stock exchange. Seeing a price of ~400 GBX threw me for a loop as I thought the price was in the $3.50-5.00 range. It turns out this is British pounds pence (pennies). OK cool, now how to buy it?
I use Fidelity. There is nothing found there for RPI.L. More Googling turns up RPBPF. It seems shady. The 6-month chart of RPI.L and RPBPF do bear a resemblance but definitely differ more than I would expect. More Googling. I find* the below Reddit thread which increases my confidence (no one screaming that it is a scam). It also raises some interesting information about lock ups and insider shares. Whatever, let's buy this RPBPF then.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/1h6xord/raspberry_pi_stock_in_the_us_otc_rpbpf/ *Technically I found this today, but it fits the story nicely to say that I found it back then (around Thanksgiving) when I was doing this. But the thread is only 4 days old! There were other things I was finding then but I'm not going to dig around in my history to find what they were.
RPBPF does show up in Fidelity. Next -> Next -> Next and bam "Fidelity does not accept market orders for illiquid securities. Please change your market order to a limit order."
OK...I guess I need to do a limit order. I am familiar with the basic concept of a limit--don't want to buy for more than say $3 so place a limit buy order for $3 and when the price drops to $3 it will buy it. But what about if the price is rising? IDK, so I did a limit order for $4.30 which was the most recent price. This sat for over one (US) business day with no action. I think there was a long stretch of days over Thanksgiving where trading wasn't open in London. Or something.
Mentality is changing now. I want to buy this at whatever market price, so...a limit higher than the current price? Some research made it seem likely that I could set a high limit and only end up paying the market price. Fidelity: "For example, if your limit is $100.00 per share and the market fills your order, it's possible you could buy shares at a price lower than $100.00.
So at this point I am somewhat sure that I won't give someone a big juicy sale price. I tried at (from what I recall) $6.00, well over the latest price I was seeing of $4.30. It said that was too high. So I tried again at $5.25 and that was accepted. Now to wait.
I checked a couple days later and I had shares. The fun part is that it shows an average cost of $5.28 per share. What the heck!? Well, I was planning to hold for a long time anyways which will ease the pain.
I will accept any mocking and face-punches. Please accompany it with a pointer or other bit of productive discussion.
