Count from a table, but stop counting at a certain number

Question

Is there a way in MySQL to COUNT(*) from a table where if the number is greater than x, it will stop counting there? Basically, I only want to know

Answer 1

This works:

select count(*) from ( select * from  stockinfo s limit 100 ) s

but was not any faster (that I could tell) from just:

select count(*) from stockinfo

which returned 5170965.