Thank you for the update, you guys rock 
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Good on you, Anil. I understand that people are angry, having potentially large sums of money tied up in extremely risky stocks, but equally think it’s a shame that so many threats etc are being fired at Freetrade for something which is most likely out of their control. From time to time these things will happen (Freetrade are certainly not the only ones), and they are showing how much they care about their customers.
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Completely agree - once people have calmed down, and assuming Freetrade continue to handle it they way they are, it could be positive as plenty of new users/exposure has come of it.
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How significant a contribution are fractional trades to the current daily volume @Viktor? I could imagine that you may be seeing lots of smaller transactions in the likes of GME for example, and if this is the case would switching temporarily to whole shares only purchases make a difference? Good luck to you and the 
team this weekend.
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A $1b question that DTCC asked and that RH had to answer quite quickly was “Do you have the margin for this…?” and this was also followed by “Just send it to us then; now.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-29/clearing-firms-prevent-cascading-failures-q-a-with-larry-tabb
One might ask the same question. So, does have the money…?
Freetrade doesn’t do CFDs
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I also agree that FX has nothing to do with this; FX markets are the most liquid and efficient (not blaming Freetrade here since this is what they have been told).
But it has been widely published in the media this week that the Central Clearing Counterparty in the US (DTCC) increased the margin deposit requirements overnight for all the high volatile US stocks (volatility is built into the risk models).
I’m not sure people care to pay attention to this but the Clearing Broker has to front the settlement via deposit margin calls from the CCP against all trade transactions to cover clearance and settlement (it takes two days to settle the trades) and they cannot use client money for that due to regulation.
Normally DTCC will request a very low deposit cash margin call from the Clearing Broker but this increased ten fold this week.
So RobingHood to avoid having liquidity issues since they do their own clearing blocked buying on those stocks:
And for the other small platforms that uses a Clearing Broker. Well the Clearing Broker could not afford or was not willing to cover the increased deposits margin requests from the CCP and also also blocked buy trades on those stocks:
Hence why is this going to be any different with FreeTrade?
It’s Clearing Broker (Barclays?) could have also decided not to take the additional cost and risk on their books by blocking buying on US stocks particularly if they didn’t have the ability to easily block specific stocks within their clearing services systems.
People are saying this is a conspiracy theory. Not it is not it is all over the news it is just putting some scrutiny on official press releases. It’s a bit of a Black Swan event.
It would have been great to see DTCC coming under scrutiny by the financial press a bit I mean did the increased volatitlity really called for a ten fold increase in margin requirements? But this will never happen they are a monopoly in clearing and settlement on US stock markets.
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Surely the FX provider does play a role in fronting the money on the US side? If the provider only has a limited size pool of cash to draw from and can’t replenish it quickly enough due to settlement times(?) they would have to restrict the number of transactions?
Hoping to see another postmortem thread from the FT team in the coming days to explain what went wrong.
That is also a good point.
Yes please as some other brokers where still open for trade but I was tied in with ft
DTCC are asking for 100% margin on the single stocks we are all talking about here so it does not matter whether it is CFDs, margin trading or cash trades. They’re now all the same: 100% cash upfront.
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Any reason why NOK is still frozen on Freetrade while other US trades are open?
I don’t think you can read anything into whats open today. I’d imagine Monday morning we’ll get a message with good news or not.
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Every future unicorn buckles under pressure at one time or another, including Betfair and Revolut. The key is to resolve this issue and get back up and running as quickly as humanly possible. If you don’t have the resources to do so, get a quick fundraising done and hire like crazy and build the best platform in the UK (sadly FT isn’t top dog yet, but not far off). Need to strike while the iron is hot in this digital land grab.
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FT had started to reopen some US stocks on Friday. The reason is that the FX provider reduced their limit by 18x, which means it became risky to allow people to buy high traffic stocks as if the limit was reached people would be unable to sell and exit their positions, which is dangerous. NOK would obviously be high traffic at the moment so would not have been one of the stocks considered to be reopened.
More: https://twitter.com/freetrade/status/1355196448938356743?s=20
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Yes, it was annoying, inconvenient and shocking, to be honest, as I, and many others lost money because we couldn’t trade live etc. However, Freetrade have been transparent from the start and were not responsible for this issue. You shouldn’t have to refund me anything as you have done nothing wrong. If possible, don’t refund me January’s Plus fee. If you have no choice and refund it, I will give the money to charity.
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the 24 hours people on many trading platforms wont get back
they didn’t stop retail “pirates” from selling though
the power of the crowds tho! 
“we can be retarded longer than you can be solvent”
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no trading app is free of citadel and point72 
“rob in the hood”
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Robinhood receives revenue by payment of order flow to Citadel.
To my knowledge FreeTrade does not do payment for order flow.
In fact if I am not mistaken this restricted in the UK as it would break regulation rules (MiFID II). Not sure if this is going to get change now post Brexit though.
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