It depends on how you define 1st time vs āintermediateā investor.
Is someone who has been investing for years but sticks all their money into the All World ETF an intermediate investor?
If so, why would they need any new feature right now if all they do is āinvest and forgetā?
Of course this is where the demographic is important and only FT themselves can answer this: Who is their customer, someone who invests once every few months or someone who invests several times a week?
Donāt get me wrong, a frequently updated product can only be a good thing thatās for sure.
Agreed. What constitutes a beginner investor or an intermediate (or higher) invested is subjective.
Iām someone who started in 2016 using EQi back in the day. In my eyes Iām an intermediate investor.
I suppose I come from the premise as does those on the investment discord that more option and availability is a good thing.
Example could be for every one stock or ETF I hold there are thousands I donāt. But itās nice to have the freedom and the option.
Example, do I want to buy $GME? No because I see it as something thatās been overhyped, but itās nice the option at least exists.
Or put another way using a non investment example.
With a Romanian passport as well as a British one I can visit Poland without the need for a visa or ETIAS. Do I want to do that tomorrow, probably not but itās nice to know the option is available if I want a weekend break in Krakow in the next few years.
This āitās nice to know you have the optionā mindset is a key theme in my thinking
Of course everything to offer is already known and I never suggested FT would invent anything new but competitors WILL care and want to know what is the next that FT will offer. This is why I said āmay just beat them to itā as they could equally offer the same thing.
It is a cheap budget platform so wont compete for the functions of the expensive platforms as these things cost money to run/implement but the cheap platforms are in massive competition of what they can get away with offering so cheap.
This, 100%, direct competitors would love to know what their rivals are planning same as FT would 100% want to know what Lightyear, Etoro etc have planned for the next additions.
Agreed. I am a complete newb to trading (Nov 2021) and began using Freetrade. At the same time I opened accounts with eToro and Degiro to experience their features.
Freetrade is by far the most flexible for the stage that I am at - learning who, how, when and what to invest in, with small sums of capital investment possible through fractional shares. However it is easy to see the benefits of the other platforms and I regularly flip between applications in order to use other features not available on Freetrade.
As a newb my biggest frustrations with the FT app are:
Delayed pricing
No idea about spread
No links to ex-dividend dates (I use Yahoo for this)
Plus logo covering pertinent information
When changing the timescale for āyour investmentā the profit/loss sum remains all-time rather than matching the selected timescales as it does with each share chart.
I am still using FT as my main app despite these frustrations, partially because I am paying for an ISA but also the flexibility of fractional shares. The user interface is great too (especially for a newb) and I can see how adding too many features could interfere with this.
@orbitalinvestor If are using some third party source of āpriceā and comparing it with what you see or get on Freetrade you are working under a misunderstanding. There is no āDelayed pricingā. The price you see is not guaranteed price, it is something that you should consider as indicative: the actual price you pay is the price that can be obtained for the number of shares you wish to buy and/or sell at the time of execution not at the time you see a price. This is what is known as an instant order. A related type of order for an order asked outside trading hours is called a basic order: here orders are queued up and executed the following day at a specific time. Two other types of order exist: if you want to sell and/or buy at a specific price you need to stipulate a limit or a trigger. The latter is part of Freetradeās plus service.
To reiterate: when you go to buy or sell shares it may be the case that nobody wants to sell or buy X shares so it may be the case that even if you ask to sell at Y pence it might not happen because nobody is willing to buy/sell at that price.
All other platforms that I am aware of also differentiate between these order types (if indeed they give you the option at all).
I use third party price comparisons whenever I get a warning from the FT app that I am purchasing at a price that has not been updated for some time, just to check that I am not paying well over-the-odds!
I have a plus account and have so far only used Market and Limit orders.
I really hope that Trading 212 donāt get LISAs before Freetrade because Iāll be moving my LISA away from AJ Hell as soon as possible and if that means to Trading 212 instead of Freetrade then thatās what Iāll have to doā¦ and that would really suck because I like Freetrade.
Iām a real newbie to buying shares, less than one week. Like many people Iām frustrated with the low bank saving rates and decided to try and do better. I found the app by accident and it has converted me to investing. The fact itās free to start and simple to use has been very important. Iāve thought about share investing before but the cost to trade is immediately off putting. This community is also great Iām learning lots of things. I shown the app to two other people and I think they will also try it. So Iām trying to illustrate this is a good product meeting its objectives to attract new people into investing.
I would ask that developements keep the simplicity of use. Please donāt fill it with complex acronyms to scare us newbies off. I see the ability to choose from more companies is good and some easier searching tools and ability to order based around price/changes would be an advantage.
Of course FT hopes I will convert to Plus. It looks a good deal as I see that if I leave Ā£4k in cash at 3% interest and take an ISA makes Plus close to being free. A bit more experience and I might do this in April when the ISA year starts as Ive locked this year in a cash ISA.
I just ask please grow the app carefully to retain itās simple use.
This is the same reason Iām not crypto positive.
Up until now Freetrade appears to have prided itself in being beginner freindly amongst other things.
I feel that a new investor could easily loose money on crypto and this could put someone off who otherwise would grow as an investor with freetrade.
I seriously think freetrade has to choose a side.
Stick to your ethos of being user friendly to someone who started investing yesterday (while also having functionality that would appeal to intermediate+ investors) or go the crypto route.
Whatever oneās opinions about Crypto it is difficult to argue or imply that Crypto is not beginner friendly. The plethora of investors and in particular young investors, or people whose whole introduction to investing is Crypto, shows us that the reality is different.
True but the ratio of people who will now lose money through Freetrade will rocket when they introduce crypto. Personally, I would probably buy it but it would be crazy for us not to accept that it would bring a lot more complaints in the future when people lose their savings.
As I mentioned earlier it is clear as day about 20% of Etoro ratings are related to this kind of thing and FT would instantly inherit a similar amount. (Etoro currently get about 20% more 1 star than FT)
Iād say it is popular with the kids rather than it being beginner friendly which is quite different.
Yours is a reasonable point of view. Nevertheless, seriously I am always amazed by the number of people that I meet that donāt invest in shares of any kind but invest in Crypto.
(Technically, the people I mentioned āthat donāt invest in sharesā do invest in shares but basically via their monthly pension deduction so are not āactivelyā involved)
Hi @Chris5. Iām a newb too and liked the simplicity. You make a really valid point and it gave me an idea. How about having both an advanced and simple user interface which can be switched in the settings tab of the app. This then offers the best of both worlds, the simplicity that drew us both here in the first place and the ability to advance our trading as we learn more and become more sophisticated (profitable?)
I find this whole āpeople will lose money if Freetrade offers cryptoā thing really patronising and condescending. Iāll have you all know that Iāve been perfectly capable of losing money just through my normal process of picking doomed stocks. I donāt need access to crypto to do thatā¦ also my crypto (just ETH) in Coinbase is actually up!
My issue with Crypto on Freetrade is they havenāt finished the standard stockbroker features yet. Iāve no objection to having crypto, but I think getting the core stock trading features in is more important
They have a challenge to meet the needs of real beginners and yet keep us satisfied as our knowledge grows. Then they must keep the longer term investors, who will probably have more invested, happy to create FTs regular games ncone. To do this they will need to have a least subareas to meet the requirement of the experienced amongst us. I think that is how Plus is being developed. You can start for free with a small number of tools but if you become serious (and Iām sure many people will open a basic account and after realising you need to be careful and develop your knowledge decide not to bother) you need Plus because it opens up a larger set of tools and information. I havenāt jumped to Plus or even an ISA yet, but I can see it will be needed later.
or even a EV one 
lol.