RH also aren’t even offering an ISA right now (which I’ve seen claims that they’re planning on to despite all of their holdings being $), so yeah not the best platform for UK right now, unless you’re into margin investing.
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the last 2 rounds did not offer EIS so not able to claim.
Agreed - with Vanguard putting up fees on small accounts too the alternatives are sub par.
I especially like this bit:
The amount owed to A Ordinary and B Investment shareholders is an estimate. The exact proceeds you will receive depend on, amongst other things, the total transaction costs, which are paid from the total consideration.
Translation: £1.19 is the best you can hope for, but will be less.
Haha also does this mean that we ordinary shareholders are footing all the costs, the VCs etc don’t have to pay anything?
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Well technically you can still invest in IGG
Who has the B1/3 series shares? Are these from the convertible round recently?
Ah man didn’t realise that.
Yep, and not to mention that Crowdcube like other trading platforms warns you before you put any money down which is all they can really do.
I did however see one person managing to clear back a ridiculous amount of losses from Trading212 once via the Ombudsman which was a ludicrous case despite Trading212 doing everything it reasonably could, but that really is a ridiculous anomaly that is unlikely to happen again.
@acamp Why are posts relating to the acquisition of Freetrade being merged into a thread from 2023?
No objection to merging multiple threads into one but this news deserves its own thread - not to be “hidden” in one from a couple of years ago.
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I’m honestly happy with T212. Yes there may be some justified criticisms as there are with any platform, and for some reason T212 has a stupid amount of fear mongering on Reddit, but otherwise T212 really is what FT should have been and is continuing to improve even if it is a bit slow (e.g. SIPPs are finally supposed to be coming out this year at last).
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Ah damn, I somehow missed that part. Might as well wait to work out the actual loss, which will probably be even worse than this!
The valuation of £160m is fair:
- 5.6x Revenues 2024
- 80x EBITDA 2024.
We just overpaid in the past. Nobody put a gun on us to invest at £300m or £650m.
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Wow… After investing 3 separate times since 2019 I’m coming out with a loss (Even after EIS is taken in to account). That’s me jumping ship to 212 then
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Yes no complaints from me as I’d written it off anyway. Appreciate £9.25 investors may feel differently but caveat emptor
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I hope this deal falls through - surely this is not the story and legacy we all invested in.
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I invested in Rounds 2, 3, and 4, achieving a 3.6x return, including EIS benefits. In hindsight, I should have exited in the secondary offer a few years ago when the share price offered was more than three times higher. Looking back, I was also right to call out the inflated valuations from 2020 onwards. At the end of the day, Freetrade is just another discount broker in a highly competitive market with clear winners and losers.
For early investors, this was a mediocre but acceptable outcome. However, the most important takeaway is that crowdfunding often feels like a fool’s game. Crowd investors tend to be either the company’s target market or a last-resort funding source—and in both cases, they’re frequently taken for a ride
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18 months ago they crowdfunded at a valuation of £225m / £2.60 share price. They’ve grown and reached profitability since and now sell at a valuation of £160m / £1.19 share price? Make it make sense
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In case you want to understand more as to why Viktor is very happy happy with this deal that brings him 15x return on all of his life savings at the moment of 2016 and seeing he worked at Google and other companies for a while it probably not nothing. I also imagine if he stays on he will be well compensated for further growing a company that is now growing naturally and via inertia - sold at the exact right moment before it actually started making money and starting to scale big.
I also guess it’s one thing to invest in successful start-ups and another to actually build one or turn one around.
“Basically, the platform takes care of everything. So I invested in the very first crowdfunding round of Monzo and Revolut, which both of them turned out to be great investments, but nothing is as big as my investment in Freetrade, which was my third investment that summer, in summer 2016. I saw the pitch and I had the same feeling again like this, this has to exist. I wanted to open my ISO. Then I arrived in the UK, I ended up with a suboptimal solution, eight pounds per transaction. So I was like, What can I do to make this happen? So I looked across my bank accounts in Ireland, Hong Kong, I put all the money I had at the time, and I invested everything in Freetrade.”
Full interview: Freetrade's Viktor Nebehaj on crowdfunding as advertising — Automated Creative - AI driven ads for social and display
I’ve said this before, crowdfunding is basically paying the salaries of the founders until they can get a preferential exit for them only and not the investors.
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What’s interesting to me is how many people here are saying they’re going to leave Freetrade as a customer just because they got screwed over as investors.
Can I ask why? (and this question goes out to everyone else who’s said the same thing). After all if you’re happy enough with the product to have remained this entire time then why should this sale affect you in that regard?
And just to be clear this isn’t a question I can personally answer, because I became jumped ship several years ago now because I became unhappy with Freetrade as a customer before I did as an investor.
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This feels like a reasonable comment not about price but about the mission!