When in the process of Buying and Selling low volume stocks it is important to be patient.

• The spread between the ask and offer price may be large in low volume stocks.
• Using market orders always gives you a lousy price in the low volume stocks.

If one is a bit patient and put out a reasonable limit order, perhaps yesterdays close there is a good chance you will get filled during the day. But it is tempting to want to get in or out fast, but that often cost a lot more and some hours to or from is not going to make any difference when you plan to hold the stock for a long period of time (years).

What matters is if one constantly gets filled perhaps 1% less of what one possible could by being a bit patient, one is wasting a lot of money if you make some trades per year.

It is no problem to own illiquid stocks as long as the number of stocks does not increase over what is possible to sell during one day. That would probably be less than 10 percent of the average daily total trading volume.

For stocks that are hyper liquid such as Intel or CISCO it is very easy to just use market orders and you will be in or out in a matter of seconds. You could of course try to use limits, but the spread on these fast trading stocks are often small.

You should always try to maximize your position, which is to get the most advantageous price possible. That said we are not talking about day trading, it is when you have owned the stocks for a year or more and you want to sell.