i do not consider selling costs here. There is usually no fee for obtaining the stock only selling it... and the fee for selling will generally vary from $15 to say $170. If you get stock through a broker then most likely the minimum fee is $100 or 1% of the transaction (whichever is higher). As for $10k, that may be a lot for some and not much for others... In the above scenario whether it is 2k or 10k the return is the same excluding brokerage.
In fairness what is very hard to measure is how easy it would have been to get $10k stock in some of them (eg. EX1, NXS, A1G, EMV).
