Forum AMA with Freetrade CEO & Founder, Adam Dodds, Thu 26 May

Congratulations on the recent funding round, which will provide more capital to keep the company agile during the difficult economic times ahead. :+1:t2: :muscle:t2:

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It will be on this thread.

I wouldnā€™t hold my breath if only about 20% of the questions are answered.

  1. Itā€™s quite apparent you donā€™t like third parties like Seedrs being involved in secondary sales and posts on the forum offering to sell shares are closed down pretty quickly. Are any VCā€™s currently interested in offering liquidity for early investors? Even at a significant discount to Ā£9.25 there would be people who would probably appreciate some liquidity. This should stop secondary sales taking place at discounts on third party platforms like Forge Global and Seedrs and enable those sat on significant paper gains to take some chips off the table.

  2. What is the long term plan for the business now - do you still want to IPO or has the recent market changed your position? Would you be opposed to being acquired? What are the VCā€™s pushing for?

  3. Please share the full terms of the convertible - if not on this thread then privately by email with all investors.

Without knowing the discount, valuation cap, longstop date, interest rate, type of shares to be issued etc. no one has any idea if the raise was a success or not.

Edit: I have looked quickly through the accounts on CH which just got published this morning. 10m was received in January (great news) as part of the convertible. Were the terms for the second 20m installment the same or different to the initial 10m?

  1. Are existing shareholders going to be given the opportunity to invest on the same terms? If not, why not?

  2. Are you actively looking to raise a Series C now or are you going to wait until the market (hopefully) picks up and just use the new runway you have until then?

Edit: In your accounts you say the business can continue as a going concern until February 2023 based on the 18m you had received by Feb 2022. Now we have another 20m committed does that mean we have runway until the end of 2024?

  1. How close are we to the 100m 2022 revenue you predicted we would hit?

  2. Are you planning on launching Europe wide in Q3 (as alluded to in another topic)? I personally think we should be launching everywhere and adding local tax wrappers later at this point or we are just going to lose market share. Now Sweden is pretty much done and you have the authorisation to passport the license across the EU - is it a relatively simple process now to scale?

  3. Why are you not adding LISA and JISA and more features for Plus? When it launched nearly 2 years ago(!) we were told it was a really basic start and loads would be added to it to make it more attractive to sign up toā€¦yet nothing has changed. HL is still a better proposition for any serious investor - and cheaper for larger transactions because of the reduced Forex fees on bigger trades. It pains me to say this and wish FT was more competitive. Are you just not bothered about people like this using the platform?

  4. Bonus question: Howā€™s you personal portfolio doing YTD?

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I think itā€™s already been asked but Iā€™d like to know how current trading volumes compare to the meme stock craze last year. Seening news that retail are buying the dip.
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Absolutely fantastic questions BUT will they be answered? :pray::pray:

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Hey everyone. Weā€™ve reached the deadline for questions, thank you for all your input. @adam will answer as many questions as he can tonight.

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What time will this be

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Is this confirmed, can you list the source, please ?

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Come on Juno. Give Adam a chance to answer

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Thanks Hooked! Weā€™re incredibly grateful to have such supportive investors that believe in our mission to get everyone investing - both institutional and crowdfunding.

Weā€™ll share the terms of the CLN in due course and plan to open it up to our retail shareholder base as well. We want to mirror the terms as much as possible but are still working on the detailsā€¦ sometime this summer probably.

Our Series A and Series B lead investors packaged the note for us with Ā£5m each and the rest was filled with a mix of new and existing investors.

There are no new board seats associated with the note.

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The immediate focus is rolling out in Sweden, our EU HQ. Weā€™ve already started onboarding the waitlist there. There are some local must-haves we need to finish up first before rolling out to a public launch, which our Swedish product/eng team is working hard to ship ASAP.

After Sweden, Ireland is up next and weā€™ll make that available more widely (English, Euro accounts) as we roll out more localised versions of the app for specific markets.

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Yes, early days it was all about user growth. These days itā€™s more about revenue and proving out the business model. Given the current macro environment we are more focused on efficiency over adding headcount.

Viktor canā€™t really get promoted (unless he takes my job) but the new COO title is to better recognise his expansive remit - heā€™s our Chief Everything Officer lol.

We are hiring for a VP Growth if anyone knows someone great let us know!

On the community, we are looking how we evolve it within the product but wonā€™t be redesigning the product to lead with ā€˜social tradingā€™/stock tips if that is what you mean.

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The community here is incredible and I donā€™t believe itā€™s reaching its potential. Iā€™ve got some ideas if you want to chat.

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Thatā€™s so hard to say. We raised the latest funding round as a note partially so we didnā€™t need to worry about pricing the round during turbulent public markets.

The stock market tends to be a leading indicator and it seems clear to me we are in a recession now. My personal view is the broader market hasnā€™t bottomed yet, but will over the coming quarters. It will come back, as it always does. We just need to keep growing and weā€™ll be well placed for the next priced round.

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Automated pound cost averaging. I feel like it is an exceptional opportunity to put money to work in the stock market given where prices are, but a fools game to call the bottom in this bear market. Best to keep investing with a long term outlook.

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How long till we can take advantage of the features benefits :wink:

Edit: I know its against the rules to ask more :sunglasses:

It is kind of impossible to say re crypto. You only need to read the news to see how the UK regulator is still settling on their views/rules around crypto.

Weā€™re taking the cautious approach, but firmly do want to offer crypto to our customers within the regulatory framework in each market we operate.

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  1. Product delivery hasnā€™t been good enough. Externally, it looks worse than reality though as so much of what weā€™ve been building is not visible yet. For example, building the hard infrastructure for trading European stocks doesnā€™t have a massive impact for our UK customers but is setting us up for the next stage of growth in Europe.

  2. Growth this year will be more modest. My estimate at the time of the last crowdfunding was based on the bull market continuing unabated, which obviously hasnā€™t happened. We do continue to grow through the downturn in the UK and Iā€™m so excited to finally be in a position to grow our EU customer base.

  3. As I mentioned in an earlier response, we have shifted to more of an efficiency mindset over growth. Of course, weā€™re still focused on growing the business! But yes, making sure we get to breakeven/profitability sooner is simply a reality in the current environment.

  4. Only to the extent that we can target the right type of future customer.

  5. I feel like we are and have always been focused. So many firms are trying to do too much imo, eg ā€˜financial super appā€™. We are your home screen investing app, where the bulk of your life savings lives and grows. Thatā€™s our singular focus.

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Fractional UK shares have been difficult prioritise over other features given how low share prices typically are (ie priced in pence rather than the hundreds of dollars you see for many US stocks), so there isnā€™t much of a barrier to investing the amount you want in a given stock.

Not sure about the UK REIT/ISA issue tbh, but will ask the product team.

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  1. Building capital markets infrastructure from scratch is really fucking hard.

  2. Weā€™ve built ā€˜full stackā€™ pan-European infra: Stock exchange ā†’ Clearing house ā†’ Central securities depository.

Equiduct is one venue we are members of. The pan-European venue we are members of that you might be more familiar with is CBOE Europe (formerly Bats, Chi-X). We will continue to add more venues in Europe, including primary exchanges like Nasdaq Nordic. The benefit of starting with pan-European venues is that we can provide the most liquid stocks from across European primary exchanges. Eventually we will offer everything, like we (almost) do in the UK.

  1. We are still hiring for the role, but more of a ā€˜CTPOā€™, which Viktor is doing right now. The reality is that a ā€˜CTOā€™ hire for us a year or two ago is closer to a Director or VP level now. We are hiring at that level too.

  2. Youā€™ll see some exciting changes in our plans very soon!

  3. It is something we know customers want, I wonā€™t put a date on it though. Pensions are such a huge opportunity for AUA growth and are incredibly sticky products.

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