GME Short Squeeze and Limit Sell limitations

Honestly this is just crazy :joy: :joy: Maybe read the T&Cs and check what the platform does before accusing it of doing these almost criminal acts :+1:

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@DanSenpai welcome to the forum. This is a very well discussed and boring topic that is covered in many thread. As @Big-g said itā€™s probably best for you to do some research before accusing a company of illegal actions.

If you donā€™t feel as though FT is the right platform for you to be made a millionaire / billionaire that is your right as a customer. Iā€™m sure you could use some of your future wealth to pay a few quid for an alternative platform.

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What one stock is over 25k a share?

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None. GME speculators believe the price of the stock is infinite and are worried about something that wonā€™t ever be a problem.

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If share prices ever got to that price, adjustments would be madeā€¦ Too many conspiracists. It wouldnā€™t be GME, more likely amazon or alphabet

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But that doesnā€™t play to the tin foil hat conspiracy @Pdw

Without stock splits Microsoft would be over $90,000. If the crept to high another split would likely happen.

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This I didnā€™t knowā€¦ Has alphabet or amazon ever done a share split?

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Amazon - Not since the millennium bug was keeping people up at night.

Google - Yes 2014 & 2015 but theyā€™re unlike any split Iā€™ve seen before. Very weird numbers, I donā€™t know the rationale behind it.

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Here are some examples of how things work.

Letā€™s assume the price per share is Ā£25,000. You sell the 1 share for Ā£25,000. No problem.

Letā€™s assume the price per share is Ā£50,000. There is a Ā£25,000 limit for the trade. How can this be?! Isnā€™t it BS if I have to sell for 25 what is trading for 50?! Isnā€™t this a ripoff?! Well, it would be if that were the case. In reality itā€™s not how it works.

In reality, if you have a share the market prices at Ā£50k you will sell it for Ā£50k, or thereabouts, in spite of the Ā£25,000 limit. The Ā£25k limit referes to the maximum size per trade on Freetrade regardless of the price of the share. Because Freetrade offers a feature that allows us to buy and sell fractional shares, and because there is the Ā£25k limit per transaction you would only be able to sell half of your Ā£50k share in one go. The other half would remain in your portfolio until you sell it, which you could do immediately or at a later date. Your call. Makes sense?

Now letā€™s assume the price per share of Company A is Ā£10 and you own 10,000 shares. Because theres a Ā£25k limit per trade you will only be able to buy or sell 2500 shares at a time. And so on. Makes sense?

Also, the Ā£25k limit referes to the US stocks. For UK listed stocks the limit per trade is Ā£9,900 if memory serves. Why on earth?! Because buy trades above Ā£10k have to pay a 1% tax which name I donā€™t recall

Hope this helps

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Would be really nice to see freetrade automatically split a request to sell Ā£20k say into two 10k orders and automatically split a request to sell $30k into two orders too to get around this limit. Then it would be pretty transparent to the customer. At the moment I find the uk 10k limit a bit annoying.

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I donā€™t personally like that but see the point :+1: I think the 25k is great as you canā€™t accidentally sell 255k with fat thumbs and pay huge fx etc. And in all honesty anyone who has an issue doing a couple transactions that take seconds is, to put it politely, very odd. Besides if you are making so many transactions that this is too time consuming then why the hell are you with FT as you should probably not be with a budget broker.

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Berkshire Hathaway A shares are over $420K per share. but they arenā€™t on Freetrade and arenā€™t likely to be

First off before I make my comment, I understand that you can sell part of your whole share aka fractional selling (letā€™s say the whole share is worth over $25k) fractionally to in effect ā€˜cash inā€™ on a stock that is worth more than $25k.

The problem with the fractional selling the feature where you say ā€œplease sell $x (max $25k) of my holding of y stockā€ is that you are relying on the ā€˜best priceā€™ mechanic where you do not set/know what price you will achieve because you canā€™t set a sell price. On a stable stock this ā€˜best priceā€™ works fine enough as it will be near enough what price you saw when you started inputting the transactions.

However on a stock that is expected to have a very volatile price during a potential squeeze there is no way I want to rely on the ā€˜best priceā€™ mechanic to sell. If the price is moving a lot in a very short space of time say the price was moving between $30k a share and $32k a share quickly when you put in your sell order to sell $25k worth of your holding you are literally relying on hope that you achieve a sell price at the upper end. Scale the share price up and potentially it gets more volatile the higher it is the more you stand to potentially not gain. This is not a criticism of Freetradeā€™s ability/willingness to achieve ā€˜best priceā€™ but I donā€™t believe/expect there is anything Freetrade could do about the issues arising from expected volatility. (I donā€™t think market circuit breakers or temporary order halting by the stock exchanges are particularly relevant to helping avoid potential the issues of achieving non risky ā€˜best priceā€™)

To be clear Iā€™m not asking for the way the fractional shares selling works as from my understanding you as the user arenā€™t allowed to set the price because your fractional needs to be paired up with the rest of a share and two different parties might not set the same sell price if they are inputting manually. I am asking that this $25k max share price on Limit Orders to be increased massively. If you force me to put a number letā€™s go $100m.

My questions are has it ever been confirmed whether the $25k limit:
is a front end artificial limit that can be changed?
is a backend limitation on FTā€™s side? Can or canā€™t be changed?
is a limit imposed by the companies that facilitate FTā€™s access to the markets?

For me this issue getting resolved will get Freetrade more Freetrade+ subscribed members (GME can only be bought by + members). With the potential upside expected from a squeeze, UK investors want to hold these stocks in tax protected ISAs as the capital gains tax would otherwise be huge. The limitation of 1 stock and shares ISA per year means investors interested in GME are making an informed choice where to hold their GME to maximise their upside. With Freetradeā€™s $25k limit as it is GME investors of which there are many are a lot less likely to hold with Freetrade given these factors.

It wonā€™t gain them many new users as only people who are either crazy/lying/in cukoo land think it will go above 25k a share and even less who wouldnā€™t sell well before 25k, besides FT have said they would react. If this was a real issue then people should/would go to a broker that wonā€™t have these restrictions but would pay more for other things.

People use FT as it is VERY cheap and a great platform/community and they have their reasons for the limits. You could always pay a bit more out and use a platform that would guarantee what you want but it is funny how many donā€™t want to actually part with money for it. If I was confident in it going even remotely close to the limits I can guarantee you I would be in a platform that offered this.

It wonā€™t happen so donā€™t panic and if/when it peaks it may just take a few mins to become a millionaire. Not exactly hard work.

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Iā€™m interested how you think you will avoid a ā€œBest priceā€ mechanic, you arenā€™t going to get better than Best price anywhere with any type of order. If itā€™s a volatile as you say it will be itā€™s likely a limit order will not go through. Freetrade (or their US partners) arenā€™t magicians. If it hits a max price for a few seconds and thousands of people are trying to sell at that price some order are just going to fail. itā€™s likely the circuit breakers on the market will trip and no one will be able to sell

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Appreciate you engaging on the topic. My motivation to include discussion on best price in the initial post was to give reasoning as to why executing a sell via a mechanic that utilises best price is less than ideal. Previous posters were saying that selling fractional up to the $25k limit was the way to cash out if the price for one share went above $25k. I aimed to point out that given volatility there is the chance that the price achieved could be nowhere near what a user was expecting making selling fractional not as viable as potentially perceived. Limit orders being an existing feature on Freetrade from my understanding fix the price at which you will sell at (set by yourself) so you are not leaving it up to Freetrade to settle on a price that could vary from what you set. This ā€˜leaving it up to Freetradeā€™ to find the best price is my understanding of best price. I was very clear in my post I donā€™t expect them to solve anything around best price.

My expectation is that the price will yo-yo rather than hit a maximum and go down forever so its not about ā€˜callingā€™ the top or selling the top. Iā€™m just expecting to be able to set a share price that my order will execute at, if Freetrade settles at that price cool if not then the limit order stays until executed or it expires (if thatā€™s a thing?). My issue clearly being that that max price is not high enough.

I totally appreciate this is a value/cheap investing platform but Iā€™ve not heard anyone saying that the $25k limit exists because ā€˜if Freetrade were to increase it then it makes their business more unprofitableā€™ etc. If it would have a negative financial impact on their business then absolutely fair enough donā€™t make the change but until then of course Iā€™m going to be asking for changes that remove limits on what their investorsā€™ upside could be. Just feels like there is an artificial cap on gain that doesnā€™t necessarily have to be there. I want people that are only dabbling in a small way (as part of their wider portfolio) in some of these crazy stocks to have access to the full upside. Currently I donā€™t think we can say thatā€™s the case.

Cheers :beers:

If you were so concerned put you full shares on set price targets and the fractional at another so they donā€™t go through together limiting the risk. As mentioned above they would need to bunch fractionals. Of course I donā€™t see any risk but following your theory. And if you think the GME will pass 25k a share then not really much point debating fantasy. If it broke 25k then sell at whatever it is selling for :joy: :joy: In reality sooooooo many people would sell their stock at 500, 1000, 5000 and almost everyone would sell BEFORE 25k. This would prevent it ever happening. Could still go to very high numbers but 25k :man_facepalming:

ā€œCurrentlyā€ they DO get the full upside and only in a unimaginable way they wouldnā€™t but FT have said they would react if the price rose enough.

I believe Adam said in one of the AMAs that the limit was something to do with compliance, so isnā€™t an arbitrary cap. He also said they were looking to get it increased.

Personally I donā€™t think the price of any of these meme stocks is going anywhere near that so itā€™s not something that I see as urgent.

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Why invest engineering and/or compliance time (and therefore cost) on a scenario that is so unlikely to happen?

Cmon folks there needs to be an element of sanity checking here as to whether something is a remotely likely scenario!

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[quote=ā€œMike7, post:206, topic:33987, full:trueā€

Cmon folks there needs to be an element of sanity checking here as to whether something is a remotely likely scenario!
[/quote

Sanity is not something you hear about often when it comes to the entrenched views of meme stock holders/pushers.

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