I’m a brand new Freetrade user, and I’m in the process of moving my speculative trading from eToro to Freetrade. I like the eToro platform and app - very shiny - but everything being priced in USD makes my poor brain hurt
Anyway, stuff I’d like to see my Freetrade portfolio give me:-
Include the stamp duty in the profit/loss assessment - and I found another thread where this was requested a while ago. I want to see the value of my investments against my true original outlay.
Where an asset is held across two or more open positions, a breakdown of the value and P/L of each position would be handy, as well as the overall value and P/L of the asset. Apologies if this has been requested before - didn’t find a thread on the topic.
I noticed the stamp duty problem too, doesn’t make sense to spend £1000 and a short while later it shows a value of £998 at 0.3% in profit
On the same note, dividends are not reflected in the P&L of a position either. If the price goes up by 5% and I’ve been paid 5% in divis, I expect to see a 10% investment gain/loss, not 5% as it currently shows.
Edit: Just to be clear, the overall portfolio P&L will still reflect the effect of dividends, it’s just the individual shares that will show an increasingly inaccurate picture of how your investment is performing.
As to your second point, I have used a few UK Based platforms over the years and none of them do this. Personally I don’t see the point. If I but 500 SBRY, top up another 300, then I sell 400 … what should I see in a two-position scenario? Tracking the average of a single position is the way I’ve always worked and makes sense to me.
Including divs paid into the P/L would throw my understanding out of kilter. I would have to do mathematical mental sumerauts to get the share price up/down. Even now it’s annoying because e.g the stock price hasn’t moved but sterling dropped to the dollar, and then it is shown as a profit. It’s not.
Even now it’s annoying because e.g the stock price hasn’t moved but sterling dropped to the dollar, and then it is shown as a profit. It’s not.
But that’s exactly the same issue as as divis. I’m not against it showing a price change in the main portfolio list, but int the detail page it’s wrong. Mind you, maybe it’s just a case of labelling? FT are showing price change but labelling it as Investment gain / loss, which is something completely different.
I used to track my portfolio with ShareScope until it became ridiculously expensive, which did show me the real “Investment gain/loss” (now I use Excel).
ADVFN’s portfolio tracker similarly breaks it down nicely: %price change on the portfolio table (like FT), and unrealised profit + realised profit = total profit on the detail page if you click on a share (unlike FT).
Let’s ignore price changes: If I buy £1k and get paid £50 in dividends then I have a £1000 unrealized and £50 realized value, a total of £50 Investment Gain/Loss, not zero.
