There is a correlation between market trends and trading activity, the strength of the correlation depends on the trend. Generally, the highest correlation we observe is with market volatility. The biggest relative spikes in trading behaviour weāve seen were the 2020 covid lockdown crash and recovery, early 2021 memestock mania, and late 2021 tech bubble pop.
Over the last few quarters, Q4 2021 was the high water mark for trading volumes, Q1 2022 was down from that peak, but still higher than Q3 2021.
I can tell you that one is being worked on right now, auto deposits as well. I understand the frustration, product velocity has slowed down way too much over the past year. No excuses, but changes have been and will continue to be made to get back to the shipping frequency that our customers used to be able to expect from Freetrade.
There is some additional complexity for stocks from certain countries, eg France has a financial transaction tax. So we shipped the first batches first as we build the additional requirements, more countries coming soon though. Swedish stocks are live in the Swedish app right now
Youāll see a revamp of our subscription tiers very soon.
Similar to the UK and US stock universes in the early days, we are prioritising getting more European stocks and ETFs on the platform so we have a full local offering in our expansion markets, rather than add new international markets at this stage.
Weāre still moving forward with our regulatory cover in those markets, but we are very much focussed on the UK and European opportunity over the next twelve months.
The FCA is not approving crypto registrations as quickly as they have in the past.
There is no marketing ban. The FCA had some concerns with the social media influencer marketing campaign we did back in October, so we agreed to voluntarily refrain from doing similar campaigns until we did a number of things like get an independent review of our controls over financial promotions etc. It is on us to give the regulator comfort that all our promotions are fully compliant.
With perfect hindsight, we wouldnāt have prioritised crypto given the delays in registration vs expectations back in the summer when we applied and put the plan together.
Hi Casba, welcome to the forum with your first post!
Opening up our infrastructure/API to others is definitely something we want to do, but is not currently the priority. Weāve taken some first steps with select UK partners, but our immediate focus is getting back to rapidly shipping product improvements for our UK and EU customers.
We donāt do PFOF (unlike the emerging German competitors) and see that more as a positive differentiation than a handicap in our revenue model.
It is certainly not every CEO who would directly spend the time to offer detailed questions on the business plans.
I just wanted to say thank you as it shows the whole team are listening and responding to requests. It makes you feel a small part of the companyās development.
The biggest challenge for us over the short term is navigating the current macro environment successfully. The world has changed in the past six months and we need to adapt with it. Making hard choices on how we deploy our precious resources to ensure the correct growth through the economic cycle will define success, rather than top line user growth or brand recognition.
That said, I think we have made incredible progress in being the default investing option in the UK for a while segment of the population. It is critical that we replicate that success in our first new market, Sweden, if we are to fulfil our ambition/full potential to be a global brand.
I think the investment we have made into technology and infrastructure will be paid off as the correct choice over this economic cycle. We have the business model to get to a sustainable position where we are not dependent on endless external funding rounds. Not everyone will survive.
Attempts at secondary markets in private company shares are not helpful for the company, in general. And the success of the company comes before individual shareholders that want to ātradeā in startup company shares. At a later, pre-IPO stage, I could see the utility of platforms like that. As I said previously, assuming our Series C is oversubscribed like at Series B, we would open up and secondary opportunity to the crowdfunding investors.
No change in the long term plan in terms of exit options. Weāve never been āopposedā to an acquisition, but are certainly not optimising for that and do wish to fulfil our potential as an independent public company.
3., 4. As I said previously, terms will be disclosed in due course with the aim of opening the note up to crowdfunding investors on the same/similar terms.
We arenāt actively raising a Series C, current market conditions make deferring the round more sensible. Weāre also looking at how we can rationalise costs to ensure we can lengthen runway beyond the end of 2023.
6.,7. Our revenue growth will be more modest than I was predicting in November, the monthly growth trajectory we saw in the last part of 2021 simply hasnāt continued into 2022. We continue to grow the business in a challenging environment, just not at the same clip. Our addressable market will be much larger in the second half of the year as well with the EU opening up, and going wide with a pan EU app will be the first step after Sweden.
Youāll see some more on this shortly with our subs revamp.
+12% in my GIA, flat in my ISA, +2% in my SIPP. Biggest current positions are Nutrien, Cameco and iShares Physical Gold. Not investment advice.
Thereās a couple responses on this, I gather itās been slower than they would have liked but not everything is visible to the customer yet, thereās a different picture internally and externally.
Thanks for the reply Adam. Yes, I mean DFM, and I agree with you that none of the execution only platforms has really set the work alight.
I look at PensionBee and just cant work out what was all the fuss about. Maybe its the supposed simplicity of it all, but the fees for a really drab set of DFM products are pretty high.
Please go do your thing and steal that market share. It is there for the taking.
