This mostly comes from a place of curiosity: Why is there such a limited pool of stocks to invest in on FreeTrade? And why are they adding fistfulls of new companies each week and not just making everything available like it is on Degiro and any other myriad broker apps? I can only assume its a work load issue (in which case please scale up this team!)
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GOOD QUESTION!
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Hey Chris, thanks for asking.
There are a few reasons why we canāt offer the thousands of stocks that weāll soon be able to offer.
The biggest one being that the process is quite manual for us right now, and so adding additional securities is hugely time intensive. Secondly, we want to ensure a good experience for all our customers, which means adding stocks with good liquidity onto the app. This means that some may not be suitable to add right now.
The good news: we are building our own investment platform which will soon allow us to scale up to thousands of securities much more easily.
You can read more here about the 500+ stocks weāve already added, and which ones you can expect on your app next, here:
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Thanks for the answer! So it sounds like its mostly a technical reason for the time being. In terms of only adding companies with good liquidity Iām not sure I agree it is a brokerās place to decide what is and isnāt a viable investment so that sits weirdly with me.
From my perspective as an early user, it is hard to justify putting investment monies through FT when there are so few options. I know 500 sounds like a lot but it is the tip of the iceberg of the investable opportunity (for example currently FT only has about 5 MREITS available!) so I really look forward to this technical solution being put in place to allow for rapid scaling.
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I think while they can only add a few at a time, concentrating on stocks with good liquidity first makes sense.
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Just to clarify this point, the choice of stocks is not Freetradeās implied suggestion of āviable investment optionsā. High liquidity simply means that Freetrade is much more likely to find buyers and sellers for its clients due to higher trading volumes of stocks in question (hence liquidity). This should ensure fewer unsuccessful transactions for the users and certainly is a good thing.
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Question Vlad but would more customers of FT attribute to higher liquidity? Could a customers buy be match with a customers sell currently or is that something for the investment platform
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This could get quite complex in terms of regulatory best execution requirements, among other things. From memory - itās been a while since I looked at this area - it could result in FT taking risk on its own book (essentially you would sell your holding to FT and then FT would sell it to another client/on a trading venue, all while demonstrating that the trade meets best ex requirements) and potentially losing out on market movements, so Iād imagine this isnāt on the cards.
The (much) bigger investment firms/banks that do this (executing trades outside a trading venue) end up meeting the test to become Systematic Internalisers - some more info here for anyone who is interested.
If this is being explored, the regulatory geek in me would be interested in finding out how it would work. The place I work for only uses third party platforms for that reason and to avoid holding risk - much easier to demonstrate best ex and makes my life a lot easier 
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To your point l, yes Freetrade (you shouldnāt use FT as that is really the Financial Times) could actually develop more liquidity for certain ETFs etc. by adding them in to the universe.
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Maybe in the future. The 70,000 users we have now wonāt even make a dent
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It is all a self reinforcing cycle. If the ETFs were on Freetrade people might trade them, increasing the liquidity and pulling others in.
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Until people come up with a better alternative if I write it in shorthand itās FT
Iāve offered alternatives in another thread and nobody took up the offer. Donāt say no to something without alternatives
Edit: I suggested FTR because I thought FRT mightnāt be the best 
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I am almost certain that The Financial Times owns the right to āFTā. Even so, when talking about financial matters I donāt think the community can be flippant about using āFTā. I have an alternative and I always use it - I just refer to Freetrade as Freetrade. If you feel really passionately about saving time you can even save it in your keyboard that typing FT produces Freetrade.
I mean to be honest, that is simply semantics at this point. It is a post talking about Freetrade and you still understood what FT was meant to abbreviate in this context. Almost every abbreviation you can think of will have a double meaning to someone. People will want to shorten things if and when they can. If Iām going to be reading the Freetrade community forum, I am also more inclined to think that FT = Freetrade.
Ye they can have their copyright Iām not trying to market anything using FT. So Iām going to change FT to Freetrade on every device I use??? Dream on What about if I actually want to use FT for FT the newspaper?
Thisā¦they in the English language is more difficult to decipher whoās been talked about than using FT on the Freetrade forum. Sorry FT forum
It is not a case of semantics. If we are all investors/users in Freetrade then we should want to do the right thing by the company. The wrong thing is to cause even a mild problem through the use of FT.
For example, if a Freetrade user or the company itself created a podcast and had the abbreviation FT in it that would directly clash with podcasts such as the FT (Financial Times) Money Show. It is best just to avoid these sorts of things in the first place.
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