Difference in purchase approach

Hi,

Been tinkering with a competitor (sorry) and noticed a major difference in the way shares are purchased between here and there. With FT (if I understand correctly) the price is an average point between lowest & highest, and the purchase is made at what FT deem the best price available so you are never 100% what the price will be just what you set as max. Sometimes trades are rejected as no reasonable price is available.

With the competitor it offers a price and fills it at that - I haven’t made many trades but it doesnt seem to reject trades at all.

Is there a reason for the differences in approach? What are the benefits offered by FTs approach? I get the most reasonable price element of it, but I am personally finding I set a price above what FT says then have it rejected quite a lot at the moment - I appreciate that’s partly due to market volatility at the moment, but I can’t get my head around what benefit is offered by showing an average rather than the live price so I can purchase more accurately.

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Jim this is the same issue as were discussing over on my post too.

Don’t worry we’re all with you and are experiencing the same difficulties.

If a mod sees this, I am happy for my thread to be integrated with BaxterLeFuture3’s post to avoid duplicates

Hi Jim

Firstly, the price you see in-app is the latest mid-price received from third-party data feeds (which is the price half way between bid and offer in the market)

We then take your order and seek quotes from market makers on the LSE’s RSP network. However, we only execute if the best quote provided is at least as good as the observable bid/offer on the LSE order book (known as ‘LSE touch price’), in order to try to protect our customers against getting bad prices.

Other brokers have different methodologies. Some will take the other side of your trade. This is not something we do because we think it introduces a conflict of interest with getting the best outcome for our customers.

There is also the issue of market volatility right now - here’s a recent post where we go into more detail on how it can affect orders.

In terms of having more control on pricing, limit orders is a feature we’ll introduce which would allow you to do that.

Hope this helps explain in a bit more detail about our approach, and why we do it this way.

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I’m sorry if this has been covered before but is there a reason that the price you will receive for your trade cannot be shown prior to confirming the trade? While I really like the platform, all other platforms I use, and have used in the past, provide this price and around 5 seconds to decide whether to either accept the price or reject it.

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Again, I think an Order Confirmation Screen which would show you the price you will definitely pay before you confirm your trade would be really beneficial as I can see that this issue is coming up a lot.

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Yes - this times a 100 - I can get my head around the approach, but I think it is only partially effective from the customers perspective - while it has our best interests at heart, it removes our ability to purchase on a defined price point - pressing buy we never know the exact amount we are going to purchase for, or even if we will get the 100 shares we want, or 98 - this is only going to increase once fractionals come into play.

I like that Ft have our interests at heart, but I also want to make the decision myself, to purchase a set number, at a set price - or even a “lowest-highest price for next time period is” approach - its fustrating that on one platform I can go ok buy me 10 shares at xx but on Ft its a gamble and can take a few attempts to get a purchase or multiple attempts to get the number of shares I wanted with them being different prices

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