I think if your careful you wonât be in that position. If you sell out fully of a stock and the total quantity is 7.7646 shares. It will sell out of 7.7646 shares during execution the price might change a few cents but you wonât be left with any remaining shares as 7.7646-7.7646=0 shares remaining. As long as your above ÂŁ2 you can sell out the full share quantify.
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Can you sell all without typing the full decimal places? what if you misstype it and end up with 0.0002 shares left? I havenât tried selling any yet so I donât know
When you press the sell button it will automatically fill the full quantity of shares. So if you have 6.2555 shares in total that quantity will be sold unless you change the quantity you want to sell manually.
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After trying out this feature a little Iâm a lot less worried about it, its made me very interested in what alpha will now offer, will we be able to specify share amounts using alpha as well as cash amounts?
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Just adding my 2p. Iâm the same, thought I might miss buying whole shares. Since Iâve had access to US fractionals, Iâve found it a non-issue. I can buy the amount I want rather than an arbitrary multiple. Thanks for the change FT. Looking forward to more in future.
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I think itâs a non issue, I always intended to use fractionals for dividend reinvestment.
However in the interests of calming people down I think Freetrade should consider making it optional
Iâm pretty sure Adam or Viktor already said theyâre going to readd whole share buying on Crowdcube, but they donât know what the UI will look like for it yet.
I think for the UI all they need to do is make both the price and number of shares field editable. it could look exactly the same. When you change one it recalculates what is in the other
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Iâm not particularly pro or anti fractional shares but this implementation has got me baffled.
It seems a user will be able to buy based on the amount of ÂŁ but then they can sell based on the number of shares, that seems disconnected.
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What have I missed. Whatâs autopilot?
Yeah, they mentioned this in an AMA, saying itâs not obviously not the ideal solution. Lots of customers are asking for fractionals and so theyâre doing it this way for the time being while they come up with a better solution.
Thanks for this, appreciate the extra colour. Confirms my initial thought that this was in fact a ârushedâ change to the system to get it delivered rather as the desired featured. In no way am I trying to regrade the rollout, I simply mean that having the feature live appears to be the single motivating factor in how this has happened.
For the long term I think its probably the right move for Freetrade but it may not be right for everybody
Hi @NorthernMoney, itâs not that it was rushed, itâs more that weâve always been doing the order flow by the investment amount.
Many Freetraders find this better and more intuitive, as you can read above. Those of us socialised to use a number of shares input might find it unusual at first.
See the related section of the blog post:
Can I specify my order in whole shares?
Since the beginning, weâve built the user interface for buying shares with the intent to shift the focus from the number of shares to investment amount, which we believe is more meaningful and compatible with building a diversified portfolio. This rollout hasnât changed that flow, the change is that youâll end up with the maximum possible number of shares for your investment amount, including fractions.
Independent of building fractional share investing, we are also testing many improvements to the process of placing a trade, adding flexibility for more advanced order types such as limits and stops. While we always intend to deliver the simplest order flow possible, as part of such advanced orders we may include a version of whole-share purchasing in the future.
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Thanks @Viktor and yes, perhaps ârushedâ was a poor choice of words on my part. Thanks for sharing the blog! Given the system is set up for amount rather than number this sounds like any change is going to be quite some time away.
Like I said, Iâm not for or against this. Long term I think its the right thing to do to attract the customers that you are targeting.
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I really hope so. (Re-add whole share buying)
Fractional shares just doesnât appeal to me. Give consumers the choice.
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Whole share purchasing should not be any sort of advanced functionality - it is a fundamental necessity for a broker.
The blog post is interesting - in some ways I agree that purchasing by amount is intuitive, what is much less intuitive is that you get an 8 decimal place fraction as a result. Similarly that falls down when you come to selling the fraction which is definitely not user friendly having to enter up to 8 decimal places! There is a fundamental disjoin between buying by amount and selling by quantity.
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I think this was already addressed on this thread earlier, but when you actually try to sell a fractional, it immediately auto-fills all the decimals. So no need to worry about getting it right. Super easy!
You should really try the feature for yourself and youâll realise itâs much more intuitive than you may think.
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I have already tried buying and selling fractionals as part of the beta test. Auto filling of the whole share holding doesnât actually address my pointâŠ
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As a user of fractionals for a while, I must say I thought Iâd miss buying whole shares and itâs really not bothered me as much as I thought it would.
While I understand itâs peopleâs money and they should be able to do what they want with it. It is really amazing being able to maximise my investment by having all my money working for me
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No sorry, you have changed the core function of the product without communicating it now youâre just expecting everyone to happily go along with your viewpoint.
We want to be able to enter a number of shares to buy instead of inputting cash, or at least a toggle for fractionals.
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