Anyone experiencing any loading app problems?

[Angy]

Lately i have been experiencing the app is slow in loading or unable to load. Is this happening with anyone else?

[hrochfor1]

Yes it has been quite slow lately.

[J4ipod94]

Yep, for me too. Had to force close the app just after my trade executed as the UI became unresponsive

[simmyx98 (Simran Marwaha)]

Yea it has been slow both just loading up and opening the app, and also when trying to buy or sell stocks it gets stuck on the processing page for a long time a lot longer than usual. This is occurring with large stocks like Microsoft so I don’t think it’s a liquidity issue either. Would appreciate this being worked on as waiting a couple minutes for a buy or sell order to go through is a bit annoying.

[hrochfor1]

Apparently the order execution is intact but the app has problems generating contract notes etc. and that is the cause of the delay.

[simmyx98 (Simran Marwaha)]

Ahh I see, yea it’s been weird occasionally flashing up saying the order is queued (even thought it’s an instant order) but then it’s gone through when I refresh so it wasn’t in a queue. Probs just a bug I guess.

[Top2020]

Happens for me every time I buy or sell. Get stuck ‘sending order’ and have to force stop the app.

[Preston]

Exactly the same with him, saying it was qued and would be under the port screen, then there wud be multiple orders, or orders I couldn’t cancel,
Tried the help chat, that was rubbish Allso.
Freetrade is really pushing its loyal customers with a app that feels like it was a A level project

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

A similar situation happened to me last week in a day of abnormaly high trading volumes, which affected Freetrade’s service provider in the US. I didn’t place any order this afternoon, hence I don’t know if today’s volume was regular or higher than normal. Therefore it may or not be a similar situation

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

I think it was last week when I got a similar message like the one you posted on your screenshot. It was after a bank holiday in the US, and the orders I placed were presented with a message similar to that one, but I don’t have a screenshot to share and compare. It was mentioned that the overall trading volume for the US markets in that day was higher than normal, which caused issues with Freetrade’s partner in the US, or the communication between both, I can’t really remember. I don’t know if today was similar, or if something else completely different caused your issue. In any case, I believe it should and will be investigated, diagnosed and sorted.

Edit: this thread explains the situation I’m referring to

US Order status delay - 8 September 2020

We’re sorry if you experienced a delay with your order this afternoon. Your order executed at the time you placed it, but we had a technical issue showing the status of the order. This issue has now been resolved and we’re working to prevent this issue happening again in the future. We’re sorry if this impacted you, please do let us know if you have any questions. We’ll also provide a more detailed update on this technical issue later this week.

Or you can jump to this post in the same thread:

@Ian

As discussed yesterday, I wanted to follow up with more detail on the outage we had this week. I’ll discuss how orders are handled, why there was a delay, and what we plan to do/have already done, to prevent these issues from happening again.

Summary

• Cumulative US order history (tens of thousands per holding) prevented our US partner from updating the status on orders.
• Our app failed to display information on any orders which were delayed in this fashion (pending).
• We have moved to a new integration model which shortcuts receipt of order status updates.
• We’ll be improving the app to show pending orders more clearly.
• We’ll improve our load testing to identify non-linear scaling issues sooner.
• We’ll improve how quickly we identify, and then communicate these issues to customers.

Orders

Placing orders either through the UK’s retail service providers or via our US clearing partner is handled asynchronously. This means that successfully sending the order to our trading partner and confirming its status are two separate processes. When you place a trade within the Freetrade app we attempt to complete both placing the order and updating its status.

Once an order has been successfully created it is put into a “Placed” status after which we keep checking with our partner for any updates. A successful placement and execution of an order will move its status to “Complete” and the app will tell you that your order has been completed. In the case of our US orders on Tuesday, we successfully placed the trades with our US partner but we were unable to receive any updates on their statuses.

If we’re unable to confirm an order’s status within 45 seconds we inform you at the end of the order flow and continue to try in the background. Right now this is a poor experience for two reasons: 1) The message shown is not clear enough and can easily be dismissed; 2) If you leave the order flow this status is not displayed anywhere else in the app - it appears as if the order never happened. We are going to improve how we handle these exceptions to ensure you always know the status of your order.

Partner integration

The Freetrade Invest platform is designed to support different protocols for different trading partners. Our US trading partner now supports both HTTP and Amazon SQS for order updates. We have been using their HTTP service to query updates on individual orders.

Historically our partner has worked in a fully disclosed manner, meaning end users are interacting directly with their platform. In our case, we’re working as an omnibus account, meaning Freetrade is seen as a single user. This means we can provide a better long term service across multiple markets as well as providing greater flexibility for our customers.

A side effect of working in this omnibus fashion, which was not properly accounted for, was how it would affect the processing of individual holdings. Rather than a number of users with hundreds or maybe thousands of orders, we’re seen as a single user with tens of thousands of orders for a single holding. Before the HTTP service is able to respond with an order status it has to process an increasingly large number of historic records for each holding. As these orders have accumulated and order volume has grown the processing of these holdings has increased leading to yesterday’s outage.

We became aware of the impact of these cumulative orders about two weeks ago. Since discovering the issue both Freetrade and our partner have been working to address it. We have been migrating to their new SQS service which doesn’t block on processing before sending out status updates. And our partner has been working to improve their HTTP service. Unfortunately, neither of these changes were ready in time for Tuesday, leading to the outage. However, I’m pleased to say that our migration to the SQS platform is complete and has now gone into production - mitigating this issue and improving US order response times.

Testing

Our Invest Platform undergoes a number of checks before launching any new features. We have a CI environment which runs a suite of unit, integration, driver and feature tests on a nightly basis. Once our automation test suites have passed we have a pre-production environment that goes through manual validation with our QA team. In addition to this our production changes are often gated by feature flags which allow us to deploy features in a controlled manner.

As well as this functional testing we also carry out load testing. And, although our trade performance indicated that we were able to handle the load seen this week, it did not account for the build-up in historic orders. We had failed to correctly project the load testing data that we had. Assuming the performance was simply a factor of the order flow.

This is a definite weakness in our testing armoury and more detailed analysis of the performance profile of our trade execution at scale would have captured this. To this end, our teams are working on a formal process to capture, analyse and project this usage more accurately in future.

Thank you again for your patience whilst we put this together and we appreciate the feedback!

Again, I don’t know if today was similar or not

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

@Speculator1

I usually love to be part of an experiment, but on this occasion I would rather be a customer, not a guinea-pig

As far as I can understand Freetrade is a startup with an ever evolving MVP. It improves partially thanks to feedback such as yours. I would rather not experience challenges of the sort, but even well established brokers find themselves with technical issues in extreme circumstances. Not that I’m thrilled about it or just accept it like if it were one of those things I just have to live with. But I do think Freetrade’s product is better today than it was 1 year ago, and I think that it will continue to improve in the future.

@Speculator1

I will wait for this to be sorted before I place another order as I do not fancy playing russian roulette with my hard-earned money.

I understand and find it sensible if you’re experiencing losses with your trading in Freetrade’s investment platform

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

@Speculator1

I guess the crown (and largest market share)

So long as we, as customers, continue to benefit from competition derived from the existence of multiple service providers, either incumbents or challengers. In order to diversify platform risk, and in the future, I hope for today my wallet is thin still, to also benefit from the 85K protection in each one. In principle, I don’t like monopolies. Not even the game