Buying shares

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1

I’m probably missing something really obvious but is there a way of actually buying a certain number of shares rather than just the value for instance i thought i was purchasing 100 shares of a certain company but when it actually went to buy it said 99 obviously i’d forgotten about stamp duty increase of price etc . Is there no way of actually saying i want to buy 100 shares and then it purchases 100 shares

other platforms let you purchase the number of shares rather than you inputting a value i’m hoping freetrade does too

hope my question makes sense

2

So for UK listed shares and ETFs you can buy whole shares (you still have to input a £ value rather than just a specific number of shares).

For US shares Freetrade only offers fractional shares. However, if you are really pedantic you could buy say £50 worth of a share worth £49.88 and then sell any left over to make it a round number (though I would advise against this as you end up double paying on FX fees and is only a cosmetic difference).

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thanks for the reply i was hoping i could just say 100 shares and it would buy them

i can understand the problems as the price can fluctuate which happened and thus meant 99 shares not 100.

Rather than thinking i want 100 shares in company x i’ll have to think i want to invest for example £200 pounds in company x etc

thanks again for the reply

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4

Which is exactly how people should think.

You want to invest a certain amount - not just buy an arbitrary number of shares.

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oh i agree its the amount you want to invest

i already owned a number of the shares and wanted to top them up i just thought there would be a way to buy x amount of shares

6

Have to admit this was one of my initial confusions with making us shares fractional only but actually I wouldn’t turn back now.

Makes it so much easier for me to balance my portfolio periodically the way I want to a certain £ value of the overall holding. Rather than holding 1 or 2 really high value shares that skew my portfolio.

Personally looking forward to doing this on UK shares too but less of an issue given the relatively lower prices per share.

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Its crazy that you can’t do both, i.e. buy a certain number of shares or buy a certain percentage. If you put in enough to buy 1 share and you only get 98.9% because the market moved that is just an unnecessary frustration. Especially since your trade gets cleared once a day you can only buy the rest the next day potentially. It’s a fairly trivial functionality to add and it works with the thinking of most new investors. Even experiences investors are probably more used to buying a number of shares which is proportional to what they are willing to invest.

Feels like an odd UX choice to make this One or The Other rather than letting the user pick

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