The New York Times (registration required) decided to promote the notion that small investors are "safer" in the current stock slide. Here are four reasons why I am convinced that this argument is hokum:

• Big funds are scrambling for liquidity and if they own stocks, they will sell them. While I agree that hedge funds and other institutional investors have been driving this market, that does not mean that the big players' market moves don't affect small investors. That's because the big funds are getting cash calls from their investors and from the banks that let them leverage up. And if they have stocks, they will sell them to raise cash. This will hurt small investors.
• Small investors fled stocks after the dot-com crash and piled into real estate. After losing parts of their shirts investing in dot-com stocks during the 1990s, individual investors shifted gears and put money into real estate. This worked well for a while. But when the real estate market started to tumble in 2006, these small real estate investors got burned some more. The mortgage-related problems of the big funds are hurting the small investors' real estate values even more by cutting off mortgage money. Banks foreclosures are throwing more real estate into the market which further depresses home prices.

Financial services industry, look out. The boys of Bentonville are moving in, partnering with ShareBuilder, to offer low-cost investment services to customers. If you're not familiar with ShareBuilder, it's become a pretty big player in the discount brokerage industry by targeting a market most companies don't: people who might only have a few hundred dollars to invest. They offer a program that is ideal for dollar-cost averaging with small amounts of money. By combining thousands of orders for numerous stocks into a few big orders every Tuesday, the company is able to offer investors an opportunity to invest a little each week (or month) without facing prohibitively high transaction costs.

I haven't been able to get a lot of details on the plan, except that the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) service will offer customers a small discount from ShareBuilder's usual costs, depending on the number of trades per month. Wal-Mart describes the ShareBuilder partnership as a pilot project.

I like this a lot -- perhaps by advertising the program in-store, curious shoppers will take the company up on the offer to put a few dollars into shares of companies they're familiar with. By bringing the stock market into Wal-Mart, I believe we could see a lot of first-time investors starting to save for their future, and I think that's the goal here -- I doubt Wal-Mart thinks it can siphon off business from Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS).

I went into my local Wal-Mart the other day and couldn't find anything on this. Has anyone checked it out? Any thoughts on it?