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You must use a minimum of 5 stocks but you do not have to own them all at the same time. Trading costs must be included. Create a portfolio on the Internet to keep track of these stocks using Yahoo financial. Follow their instructions or use the  tutorial under fpuser- startup called portfolio tracking with Yahoo. Using the Advanced Features be sure to include the number of shares you bought, the price per share, the broker's fee and the date you purchased them also the Upper and Lower limits and notes telling which strategy you were using.

You will need to setup a spread sheet to keep up with the stocks you buy and sell and to keep you from spending money that you do not have.The format I want you to use is shown below.
mtct=(move to cover trade is how much the stock price must rise to cover the cost of buying & selling the stock which is the trading cost) Work through the examples below until you understand them. Notice the mtct on each

Company  Ticker    # of    Buy    Buy     Total  Buy     Sell    Sell               Selling       Sell
Name         Symbol Shares Price Comm Invest  Date   Price Comm  mtct Proceeds   Date    Profit  %gain

Nexell        NEXL    100   $3.5      $8        $358  5/14/00  $3.8   $8      $.16      $372      5/15/00     $14      3.91%
Aware       AWRE    10   $35       $8        $358  5/14/00  $38    $8      $1.6      $372      5/15/00     $14      3.91%
Motorola  MOT        3   $118.66 $8        $356  5/14/00  $126  $8    $5.33      $370      5/15/00     $14      3.91%
                                                     Total     $1074                                                                                $42      3.91%
Notice that as the price/share of the stock goes up, the number of shares you can purchase goes down, and the mtct goes up. With only 3 shares, the price of the stock must rise more than $5 to cover the cost of the trade. In all three cases above the trading cost represents more than 50% of the gain. For this reason, you could hold stocks for a longer period to get a higher gain to decrease trading cost as a percentage of gain. Or, if using a short term strategy, you could buy only one or two companies at a time to increase the number of shares and thus decrease trading cost as a percentage of gain. Realize that there are risks associated with each of these strategies. The longer you own a company the more things can improve or go bad. The fewer companies you own the greater impact a loss in one can affect your portfolio. Consider the example below where you invest in only one company the same amount as you invested in the 3 above.

Company  Ticker    # of    Buy    Buy     Total   Buy     Sell   Sell               Selling       Sell
Name         Symbol Shares Price Comm Invest  Date   Price Comm  mtct Proceeds   Date    Profit  %gain

Nexell        NEXL    300     $3.5     $8       $1058 5/14/00 $3.8     $8     $.05    $1132      5/15/00   $74      6.99%

In this case the stock went up the same amount but the gain and percentage gain nearly doubled. The reason is that you saved $32 in commissions for the 2 companies you did not trade. Notice that the mtct is only 5 cents. The spread between the Bid and ask price is usually this much. If you understand thes 2 examples then you understand why buying 20 different companies at the same time with a small amount of money (say $2000) is not such a good idea.