Ask your beginners questions here šŸ£

Thank you for this :grinning:

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Hello!

I live in Norway, and my app store doesnā€™t have the Freetrade app available. Iā€™m wondering if I should make a US or UK account to gain access to the app. But would I still be able to trade if I have an address in Norway? And can I transfer by card or do I have to wire all deposits?

Thanks!

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Hi!

Iā€™m afraid Freetradeā€™s only available for UK residents at the moment. We are planning to expand into Europe later this year though, keep an eye on this thread for updates: MEGATHREAD: European expansion šŸ‡ŖšŸ‡ŗ - #801 by Coolsmp

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Yes, you currently need to be a UK resident to use the app at this time. Weā€™re looking to start international expansion later this year, beginning with Europe.

From https://help.freetrade.io/getting-started/requirements/do-i-need-to-live-in-the-uk-to-use-the-app

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Hey, just noticed that the help.freetrade.io site still has things about the waiting list. Is it worth removing them now that we donā€™t have one anymore or?

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Right ok, thanks! Looking forward to it. Hope you donā€™t have too many problems adding countries to your list. Iā€™ve tried registering with many brokers so far, and the process is insanely tedious. You have to list information about your whole life and at the end, you canā€™t even transfer by card sometimes. Itā€™s 2019!!

So easy access and quick registration are definitely something youā€™ll have a huge benefit with!

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you canā€™t even transfer by card sometimes.

:wink:

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Yes, theyā€™re gone :mage:

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Beautiful, 10 points to Freetrade!

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Hi everyone, I have a question. Probably a dumb one butā€¦

Is it possible to use a stock portfolio to secure a mortgage?

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How do you change the bank account linked to your profile?! @Freetrade_Team1 the knower of all knowledge :nerd_face:

Haha Iā€™m not sure about that!

Just drop us a message in the app & weā€™ll get that sorted for you :raised_hands:

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I was attacking on two fronts! Shanice squared me away on the app chat.

@Freetrade_Team1 you are still the big dog on here :rofl:

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Iā€™m going to guess no on that oneā€¦ the only way I would imagine a bank would consider it would be if you were drawing income from it and had many years of income records from the portfolio to work out an average income. I also suspect it would need a specialist mortgage advisor

Thanks @Jeff. I was thinking along similar lines. I was hoping to be able to go all in on my investments and not having to sell down for a deposit on a house.

Hereā€™s something Iā€™ve been thinking about. So there are index tracker funds which aim to only track the performance of a set of stocks within a certain criteria (say FTSE100). If the whole point is to track ā€œthe marketā€ as a whole, why donā€™t these funds simply take into account every single stock on the stock exchange?

Presumably the point is to have a diverse index, so what could be more diverse than tracking every single stock? Why have this arbitrary limit of just 100 or 250 companies according to some criteria?

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Because there already are bigger and, most likely, cheaper providers doing exactly the same thing. The likelyhood of catching that market share is quite insignificant, simply imagine beating Vanguardā€™s FTSE 100 fee of 0.09% per annum :slight_smile:

Therefore, certain funds try to come up with niche and more or less unique products, often with higher fees, simply to catch some market share of those who are, for example, only interested in Utilities in FTSE 250 or only Tech in FTSE 100.

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There isnā€™t only 1 way of investing. The ā€œpointā€ is to make money, and different people have different opinions on how to achieve that.

According to my knowledge, and the knowledge of numerous wise people who have spent their lives studying the situation, buying the entire market would be a great way to go. Thatā€™s why there are products that get as close to that ideal as possible (VRWL is the closest on Freetrade, but misses small cap companies). Of course thereā€™s a cost to trading more companies, so fees can be higher the broader your index goes.

Going for a subset of the total market, you can hope that your subset outperforms the whole. Because it has a greater weighting of the above average companies than the below average companies, compared to the whole.

In the past, for example, the NASDAQ 100 has been right up near the top of the highest performing broad ETFs out there, greatly outperforming VWRL. This may not continue in to the future; for example, if the US sees an expected reversion to mean for its currently overpriced stocks. And then VWRL would outperform EQQQ.

But no one knows what will happen in the future. If you donā€™t want to take the risk, you donā€™t make a prediction, and you go true global with VWRL. If you want to take a risk, you go with a subset like EQQQ.

For those indexes that are a subset, why that many companies? Iā€™m sure some kind of justification was made when the originators came up with the indexes. But obviously 100 is a nice round number. And importantly, itā€™s over 60, which 1 author found to be the number that virtually eliminated non-systematic risk. That is, at least within the category of that subset, once you have 60 companies, adding more doesnā€™t help your diversification goals much.

Which is to say, once you have 60 random UK companies, your portfolio will more or less rise and fall with the the whole UK stock market. For FTSE100 I suppose the theory would be 60 large cap UK companies would rise and fall with the average of all large cap UK companies.

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I think this answers my question really, if this is actually the case. However I donā€™t have a good understanding of why it would be the case that tracking more companies costs more? Is it because there is a transaction cost associated with buying an individual stock, so if you increase the number of companies you track, the cost increases too?

If thatā€™s the case, then I can see that there is some trade-off to be made between cost and the diminishing returns that adding more companies will have on how diverse your tracker is.

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Yes. Though times are changing, and costs fall lower and lower. There are even 0 charge ETFs now. I donā€™t have an understanding of the low level mechanics of how those work compared to traditional ones, though.

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