Buy and sell confirmation discrepancies to current price point

I am relatively new to Freetrade but have since made a few trial transactions to see how everything works. Since then, I have noticed some weird discrepancies for the price point in the temporary pop up window with :tada: symbol and the price point of the contract note. The price point listed on the contract is always worse so that depending or whether you’re buying or selling, you’re always losing a bit of money. For example, in the pop up window, it says I sold a Disney share at $102.43, whereas in the contract it says I sold it at $101.93. When I bought a First Solar share, the confirmation pop up says I bought it for $39.09 per share, but the contract was higher at $39.29. Basically, I always end up buying at a higher price and selling at a lower price. I noticed this at first and started taken screen shots of the pop up window to confirm. Can someone please let me know why that is?

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The price you see in the pop up window is an estimate.
If you take a look it will say “est.”, if I’m not mistaken.

The price you see in the contract note is the price you get when you buy/sell.

Hope this helps

It doesn’t say “est” and it’s different to the preview price which does say “est” before you click the order button and type in your pin.

This is called Bid-Ask spread. You’ll find numerous threads about this topic when using the search function. The price freetrade shows is a hypothetical average between them I think, not a real price.

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I see, thank you!

I think Freetrade uses the last price paid method, so that price should could be either from a buy or sell.

You could be right :white_check_mark:

Is there a reason the bid / ask is not shown? Understanding the spread before buying is definitely useful and if implemented correctly would not look too confusing. This must have been discussed before but I couldn’t find anything with a quick search.

I agree with Tim1’s comment.