hope the leadership team responds to this forum
So much speculationā¦ But until it happens or doesnāt, not a lot we can do, right?
My question, if FT is taken over/bought/whatever, what happens to my little portfolio? Would it just transfer to the new platform?
Hey Sarah - if purchased by a main āfintech buyerā in Europe like JP Morgan, youād likely see a large part of the team intact (including product and dev) so would all just continue as usual in terms of operations (e.g. Nutmeg continues very much the same as it operated prior to acquisition)
They are very unlikely to want to say anything meaningful until such a deal goes through, and they can take months to finalise and also could easily fall through at the last minute.
So I suspect weāll hear if/when it is confirmed on here, but not before, and these deals can take a long time to conclude.
Apart from the thousands of pounds Iāll lose, this is the next saddest part of it all. Even Starling and Monzo have maintained their independence and avoided selling out as they shake up the banking sector. I hope Molton and the other VCs can keep shovelling cash into Freetrade to keep it independent.
Unless you invested everything in the Ā£9.25 round Iām unsure why you think this.
There is significant value in FT.
It wouldnāt surprise me if it were acquired for Ā£3.77-Ā£5 a share.
90% of my Freetrade crowdfunding investment went into that round.
If you donāt know me by now
You will never, never, never know meā¦ oooooo.
My thoughts and prayers then.
Fingers crossed for closer to Ā£9.25 then!
The cow only wants investments that fail thatās why it got sent here from Mars.
If JP are interested then I hope thatās got big tech interested my preference would be apple
I can see big tech going after Starling or Monzo, given their flirtation with banking and finance. But Iām not sure what the FT acquisition play would be. Whatās the strategy? (Not a challenge, just ignorance!)
Re valuation I guess there are many cats that could be shaken at the tree or whatnot, but if there are 1.4m active users of the platform, then I guess there is a question of what is a decent benchmark cost for user acquisition. Seems the figure can range from around $200 to $700 or so, which putting aside the tech, IP, would mean $300 - $900m valuation? Then if you add on the various other assets and remove the lower bound (as it has some surety on numbers), then maybe $500m towards the low end?
I believe there are 1.4M users not active though so that would affect the calculations quite a bit. An awful lot of people will have got free shares and left or just leave it dormant with little in.
Much like AJ bells offering, it wouldnāt surprise me to see someone like JPM buy Freetrade.
I think the more established players are threatened by fintech brokers and if you canāt beat em, join em!..or should that be buy em?
Also CMC markets now offers in investment platform.
I think we have reached a point where established players can no longer ignore fintech brokers as they are starting to make a dent.
The Molten Ventures VCT half yearly report published yesterday marked down the value of their Freetrade holding by a whopping 85%. A Ā£1.8m haircut on a valuation of Ā£2.1m in the summer. Letās hope thatās not based on some insider knowledge! Or hopefully Iāve misinterpretedā¦
if what you read is true, then I guess there is a foul play to swallow the FT, it is a cruel world we are living in.
That was at March 2022. At September 2022 they valued their Freetrade investment at Ā£300k, with a loss of over 85% since their previous year.
I think molten invested at Ā£1 per share so they value Freetrade at around Ā£0.2 per share
They would have marked it up before they marked it down so donāt think thatās right.
I suspect they marked it up to Ā£3.77 the value at Series B. Then down by 85% to c. 50p. But where did you get the 85% from? I canāt see it in Moltenās investor report as FT is too small to be reported on.