In-app education

[christopher]

I’d like to see Freetrade incorporate more educational information within the app.

For example, once the app’s a little more data rich, it’d be nice to be able tap icons like this or hyperlinked words to get a concise pop-up explantation of investment jargon, such as P/E ratio, market capitalisation, OCF/TER, indicative spread and so on.

As another example: I’ve never been great with graphs, so I’d appreciate being told in layman’s terms precisely what a chart’s showing me – otherwise it’s semi-useless at a glance.

With any luck this sort of thing’s included within “better stock insights” or “improved portfolio analytics” on the roadmap but I thought it would be interesting to solicit the community’s ideas about how to educate investors inside the app itself.

[sparklesandsweat]

Going forward, In app education is something I really would have loved to see. I’m quite surprised this feature hasn’t gotten much traction. And I don’t jut mean an explanation of what a P/E ratio, Z-score, etc is, I’d take it a step further in that it should explain investing at it’s core.

Most of us might be reasonably financially literate, but there will be many first time investors using Freetrade in the future. I have a friend who got into investing but he was erratically investing in companies/star managers without any proper due diligence. And learning needn’t be so mundane - getting him to adopt a more sensible approach was as simple as showing him a few images:

Why we invest (An expectation of beating cash in the long term, thereby building wealth)

Risk (and/or volatility

Risk tolerance

Compounding

Diversification (not a fan of the permanent portfolio, but it illustrates diversification amazingly imo)

Active vs Passive debate

there’s lots to this ‘debate’, but fees take the cake:

I only feel comfortable referring somebody if i’m confident that, at the very least, they understand the above. Needless to say, my mate’s been plodding along passively with world ETFs ever since (I’m not knocking stock picking, etc - Just the practice of underestimating the difficulty of valuing a company). So, i’d love to see this kind of information implemented into freetrade, personally.