I just brought some shares of Vanguard Asian Pacific ETF at the live price of ÂŁ22.88. However on confirming my buy Freetrade buy price indicated my buy was ÂŁ22.95 per share!! What!!
The worse thing was that the actual live price had not even reached ÂŁ22.90 for a while after. Why was that Freetrade??
This has happened to me several times. It makes me feel cheated.
Has anyone else experienced these discrepancies?
FT show an estimate.
The price the trade was executed at was the market price at that moment in time.
We have loads of these threads and every time it’s proven the trade was executed at the best price at the time.
Set a limit orders so you can decide exactly what price you want to pay.
Indeed. All these threads about incorrect pricing are annoying. If you want live pricing, pay for it. 
aren’t likely to pay the £4 a month (or whatever it is) per user for live pricing. Not too soon from now, that could run into the millions of pounds on a monthly basis. Google generally has real-time data (or close to it) for LON shares, so check there. Limit orders help you with this. That means paying for Plus.
Frankly, if you’re going to not pay for Plus and not pay for live data, you get what you get.
This comes up as a question time and again…
My educated guess is that in this instance, this is just you placing a buy order at the best market price using the “instant order” and the Market Maker(s) (exchange market liquidity providers) just taking your oder at the top end of their buy/sell range at the time of order.
I would also note, having just checked the 1 minute chart for the ETF that you purchased, it doesn’t look very liquid which could widen the bid/ask spread a bit
As an example (made up),
price shown (mid of range) ÂŁ30.55
buy price (market) ÂŁ30.60 (price you pay to buy)
sell price (market) ÂŁ30.50 (price you get paid when you sell)
MM spread ÂŁ0.10
As I mentioned, the spread can vary due to the amount of orders being place and general liquidity for the item that you are trying to buy or sell.
If this is what I imagine that it is, it’s totally normal and it’s how the markets work. This has nothing to do with Freetrade and if you want to avoid this kind of thing then I recommend that you move to using “limit orders”, rather than “instant orders”. However, if you offer to buy something with a limit order at the displayed "mid’ price, you may find that the MM’s just ignore your order as they want to sell at the top end of their range and buy at the bottom of their range. So, it’s up to how you place the order, but it doesn’t change whether the MM’s will take your order at that price.
All that I would add, don’t really worry about this as you quickly get used to it and as long as you buy something that moves in the right direction, this bid/ask spread quickly gets absorbed within the asset price movement.
Best of luck and it’s sounds like you’re fine.
Matt