IMPORTANT: Why we had to limit the US market on 29th January (not our choice and we engineered a solution)

[kpettitt (Kester)]

@virtunus

But it is clearly this is related to additional margin requirement to the Clearing Brokers by the CCP (DTCC) because this is what is happening across the whole industry:

It’s not clear it was this and until otherwise known I think we should avoid conspiracy theories and speculation and stick to the facts

[AdamL (Adam)]

Are you saying you had selling issues? Because I was able to sell today and yesterday fine. Use limit sells if possible.

[Dynamo]

GME has traded below the opening price all day today, so would-be buyers might not have missed out as much as they think.

[Master-Sharefu (Stevie)]

@kenny

I don’t think FT should pay significant cost only to service day traders who want to buy heavily shorted volatile stocks.

Agreed. Still don’t get the ‘I lost money because of this’ line. It was never yours in the first place. EG:

@AdamL

Not allowing buying of theoretical stocks you don’t own is upsetting but it’s only like tesco running out of bogroll.

Are you then going to sue Tesco for soiling yourself because their loo roll supplier failed them and your ‘contract’ is with Tesco?
Imo this is a good advertisement for sensible, long term investment. Some people jumped on the hype train and got in a frenzy.

I’m as calm as can be because my investments are all long term. To me the dips we are currently seeing are buying opprtuinites.

[Ryan]

I definitely have had selling issues. I cancelled a triggered sell order 30 hours ago because I wanted to have the ability to sell when I believed the price had peaked.
It is still pending and I am unable to sell my shares. Every time the price drops it’s costing me real money.

[Eden]

A thread 1/n

Viktor Nebehaj

[DavidM]

were you not able to sell? Selling was still possible and orders shouldn’t have just disappeared

[Mynamesthomas (Tom)]

@Master-Sharefu

Imo this is a good advertisement for sensible, long term investment. Some people jumped on the hype train and got in a frenzy.

Absolutely. Anyone only getting involved in GME in the last 36 hours has essentially taken a coin-toss depending when they bought with the price going 300>400>120>400>300
other than the scale, no different to any other pump and dump stock and id imagine it will be a familiar group of retail investors holding the bag when this resets in the coming days/weeks

[Jim_mcgrain (Jim)]

Robinhood are limiting buys of 50+ stocks.

Changes due to ongoing market volatility

[Paul821ph (Paul Pierrepont-Henson)]

Two of my queued orders were cancelled today

[fire2045]

Will Freetrade going to take their FX broker to court to compensate losses to their customers?

Not a rant. Genuine question.

[SmartDJay (Duncan)]

Thanks for that video clip Virtuous, everything was well explained.

[albanr (Alban Roger)]

Lots of FX transactions is not unprecented. FX is the biggest market with millions of transactions/day. FX, the most resilient and mature market with the most transactions/second. Failing on that is not acceptable, ever. Barclays failed or short changed

We are in a world of algo-trading with machines dealing in nanoseconds and millions of instructions per second. engineers lecturing on tech infrastructure but failing on operational resilience discredits . Fine they know their cloud architecture, but defo can’t ensure continuity of FX service…or maybe it was a business decision failure, choosing the cheapest FX partner instead of a better one.

So Barclays failed but maybe the way send FX orders to Barclays could be rationalised, streamlined, optimised. Indeed, why do execute an FX trade for every order? Don’t they aggregate them to reduce the number of trades, especially for batched orders that you should all aggregate into 1 single FX trade? Don’t they already do this? Also, aren’t buy and sell orders netted off to further reduce the number of FX transactions? If FX orders aggregation and netting not already the case then it’s also a failure.

Finally, let’s go back to my favourite topic. Why do we even have to execute an FX transaction for every trade? Should not offer a currency account for every market with a different currency, just like Interactive Investors?

I think a Zoom call going over what happened (post-mortem, remediations, next steps) followed by Ask Me Anything (AMA) is in order, as per tradition. That would offer better transparency and renew customer engagement.

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

@albanr

Indeed, why do execute an FX trade for every order? Don’t they aggregate them to reduce the number of trades, especially for batched orders that you should all aggregate into 1 single FX trade? Don’t they already do this? Also, aren’t buy and sell orders netted off to further reduce the number of FX transactions? If FX orders aggregation and netting not already the case then it’s also a failure.

Finally, let’s go back to my favourite topic. Why do we even have to execute an FX transaction for every trade?

Because individual instant market orders?!

[albanr (Alban Roger)]

Then there should not have been any issue with batched orders which should all have gone through. Did they all go through?

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

I believe they already batch the 3 pm orders. The individual ones can’t be batched, hence multiple trades must happen. It’s inevitable. Unless we are happy to see our instant orders on hold, waiting for someone else to join. Would you like that?!

[albanr (Alban Roger)]

Did all the non-instant orders, for instance the ones to be exececuted at the open, get their FX aggregated and all executed? If no, then there is no excuse as could and should have been 1-single aggregated FX order.

[Nyxius (Samuel Triggs)]

I have £900 sitting in limbo to invest in US stocks this weekend for market open, will freetrade open up full trade this weekend? I’d like to invest in the AMC train, I have 11.5 shares but aiming for 100

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

I have no reason to think they haven’t. Do you?

[albanr (Alban Roger)]

A Zoom call + AMA is in order to clarify all this.