So the last two might not be so serious, but I’m really interested to see what we can all dream up, you never know, you might even give Freetrade some ideas!
Real priority customer support could be great. I know that every customer has to get excellent customer service but with millions of customers those who are paying for the service should be prioritized. This bothers me a lot when a paid account in one of the neo banks tells me that the waiting time is around 2 hours.
Ability to keep USDs on a separate account when selling US stocks to avoid having double FX fees when reinvesting or rebalancing the US stocks.
Ability to gift any share in Freetrade to people who are not part of the platform. I would love to get someone a piece of Tesla for their birthday. May be in some physical form like a plastic Freetrade card.
Ability to create multiple portfolios in the
app to monitor their performance separately.
My no.1 is a live quote system. It’s the one big negative about freetrade when selling it to people. Me: You can buy stocks but you just dont know the exact price you’ll pay. Them: You serious? You buy stocks for an unknown price? Me: well I get quotes from HL and then its normally identical. Them: Hmmmm.
Let’s get this live price going. Its holding freetrade back from taking over and keeping key wealthy investors outside the app.
Yes, I know they’re out of fashion the past few years, and FT has been against the idea of adding them in the past.
But I think they need to revisit that decision. Mutual funds are still where the vast majority of long-term investing is done, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
If they added a selection of mutual funds comparable to say HL, with very low account management charges (say 0.1%, or free) under the Alpha umbrella, I can see Alpha and FT as a whole doing very well.
I could not agree more. No one is going to he executing large trade amounts with a potentially unknown price. For example, selling shares owned by executives in order to move them into an ISA is not an option at the moment as the risk of getting a different price, and realising a loss, is too much.
This is something of a wishlist for Plus, but here goes:
Free ISA
Free SIPP
Limit orders
Slightly better currency rates
Slightly better versions of some tools
Early access to new features/markets (costs freetrade nothing and gives them free beta testers)
Icons, badges etc (again costs nothing)
I think certain things should remain free to every user to boost adoption, and should be priorities for freetrade this year:
Fast (< 1 sec) ledger updates and lack of glitches like graphs momentarily showing the wrong amount - this is so important to the perception of quality, at the moment the app needs some work IMO
Free trades
Watchlists (like limit orders without execution)
An emphasis on long-term investing
Autopilot investing - direct debit or standing order setup within FT, pick an index and then that’s it - tailor graphs etc to the long term
Tools with a focus on 5-10 years not days or months
Comparison tools showing growth vs indexes and vs average freetrade user - can we lift everyone by showing what outcomes they can expect?
Better data and focussed on what matters - market cap, cape, sector comparisons etc
Great customer service, with common problems automated out of existence
I do feel most customers need to be educated when they start on the likely outcomes of stock picking, and the tools given to them dictate how they invest - for example if you put the emphasis on funds (as at hl) users will invest there, if you put the emphasis on stocks (as at FT) users will invest there, if you give them indexes and show them long term gains, more might invest there. The tools that we use dictate the horizons of our world in many ways.
Perhaps but Freetrade have already stated that some stocks will be available in Alpha only - my idea on this is that they are Alpha only for a duration then released into Basic accounts to avoid that situation - temporary better then permanent IMO
Might be worth voting for share gifting. I’d really like it if we could buy a physical ‘stock gift card’ for someone, and it would be an extra revenue source for Freetrade too.
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I love the idea of gifting shares to someone. Not sure how that would work given the need to enter details on the register