I have zero interest in this feature personally, but IMO this is a bigger sell to Freetrade’s target market than Europe. Be that as it may Europe will come first, but I’d be staggered if this wasn’t very close after it on the bucket list.
Any comments from the dev team?
Hi
As an investor and customer of Freetrade, I really cannot understand why automatic allocation of customer funds so that on a monthly basis I can buy £X00 of a certain stock is not one of the highest activities on the feature development list.
I’ve got an ISA - I want to fund it with £500 into a particular ETF (V3AM) each month. I’ve actually just completed an ISA transfer from another provider, just assuming this feature would be there in Freetrade as well (and only just discovered its not!).
I can see that this feature has been requested by others for years - since at least 2018. and I don’t understand the logic of not offering this. It’s literally meaning that I have to keep another account open at Vanguard - so as to retain the ability to make regular investments into my S&S ISA - because Freetrade can’t do it. I’m sure it will be keeping some other customers away. And it is guaranteed to be losing Freetrade additional Assets Under Management.
I cannot understand why this is not already in production… Am I missing something?
It’s never been said but I’d guess they’d need to be able to offer fractional UK & European stocks before it would work properly
fractional shares seem to be the hip thing, I guess because of the ridiculous prices of US shares. but in Europe I don’t agree that fractional shares are needed at all for reinvestment. you just track your dividends and invest at a cap and carry over any remaining balance. same for monthly investing. fractional shares an a whole feature that just isn’t needed to implemented automatic investing. that’s my thought at least
This needs to be a feature. New kids on the block InvestEngine have it perfectly set up - build a portfolio by percentage and away you go!
The product director who’ll be launch the auto investing features was hired last year. There are also a few roles live now related to it.
Looks like they’re using the Vancouver office as a base for Autopilot, similar to how they’ve been working on crypto in Australia.
One day we will receive
Or they could just round down to the nearest whole number of fractional shares (if they don’t want to wait for more complex functionality), and satisfy 99.9% of the need with a “good enough” solution for the time being…
That’s the opposite of what they tend to do
They only do ETFs so if you have any shares you cant switch.
Zero chance Invest Engine keep their ISA free over the coming years also,
London has high salaries, not sure about Vancouver. If internal team is expensive and slow to develop code, outsource it to established offshore coding specialists and benefit fro time zone differences (they code while we sleep, we test while they sleep, they take feedback and code again and so on, 16 hours productivity per day instead of 8 with 50% of that at non-London Rates)
That’s a very theoretical view of the software development process. In my experience offshore developers aren’t particularly good. So the iteration goes more like: 8h work, then 8h of work done a bit incorrectly by an offshore team, then 8h of work correcting the other teams work and so on. This means effectively 4h of actual work but 16h are paid
This feature is coming soon
How do you know that?
Presumably, method of putting money into the account should be irrelevant to the auto invest. For example, i pay in by both Faster payment and Standing Order (from the same source current account). Faster payment contributions do appear in the Activity feed whereas Standing Order contributions do not appear in the activity feed.
Would therefore seem that FP and SO are handled differently internally which leads to the question whether both would be picked up by the autoinvest process.
Can we have an automated deposit feature?
I don’t know what you mean by Bamboo but could you not just set up a standing order?
is this in anyway similar to something like m1 finance does in the US. i think that would be a great addition
The competitor has launched the auto invest feature in beta and looks quite good. When should we expect in freetrade?