No I actually do not. And neither did I attack anyone. You can use whatever you want. I’d rather pay for something than support business models like this.
Just answered your ‘why’ question.
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No compelling at the moment. I would envision FT Plus to be a whole ecosystem with valuable specs, advanced insights, notifications and other market leading features mentioned above. I would not want to exit the app to gather info and track stocks elsewhere to get back to the FT app back to place my orders. I really hope the FT team will take all key points expressed here into consideration and implementation.
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I think I’ve got lost in all of the ethical debate but the basic point I was trying to make was that Trading212 is probably Freetrades primary competitor right now and they have better features which don’t cost £9.99 per month and are basic trading techniques.
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You telling me if SkyTV offered you their service for free because they subsidised the cost by encouraging people to use SkyBet you wouldn’t accept it?
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Enjoy your moral crusade against small to medium sized enterprises ethical practices, I wish you the best of luck.
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We have got side tracked yes, but I don’t think anyone is disputing that fact - T212 are further down the journey and have a different approach meaning they are leading at the moment. If I am honest I prefer their UI in the main but I support Ft ethics and believe they will make up the difference in ground - the amount of stocks being added each week are an example of that.
Currently Alpha is an ok offering, at cost yes but still works out cheaper than paying per trade like the traditional brokers. More expensive than T212 - yes but I don’t want to support T212 CFDs approach, or them lending my shares out when they feel like without giving me any benefit from loaning my equity. I believe Alpha will be improved along with Ft generally. If the decision is purely financial then I can agree it seems clear cut at the moment - for me its not purely financial.
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Look, that position is fine to hold from a first principles basis. But you also have to recognise that this is capitalism and businesses operate in a competitive environment.
There should be an honest appraisal of the competition and the offer - as well as how this is funded.
Ultimately most customers won’t care about that they just want to know what service they will receive and how much it will cost. This is business fundamentals.
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Is the sarcasm truly warranted? There is a visible, clearly growing market in ethical approaches, most brokers offer more ethical choices and packages these days. The fact that its difficult to impossible to be fully ethical across the board of all of your purchasing doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted where possible - improving the status quo happens in small bites generally, not in large gestures.
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Ultimately we all want the same thing and that’s for FT to succeed and that’s why I hit out at the marketing of Limit and Stop orders being a “Plus” feature and I think FT need to go back to the drawing board on this one.
The market has lots of tricks up its sleeve so even if FT doesn’t follow the same practices of T212 in lending your shares out, you’ll burn your fingers by setting stop losses for market makers to take advantage of one way or the other if you set them so I’m not too fussed on that front.
T212 are ahead in terms of their features and timeline but I’d imagine this is the point where FT makes up the slack and tries to compete but I don’t see the features they’re offering being much of a premium feature at all.
Fair enough, I can get behind the critical friend approach and agree we should tell Ft when we believe they are falling short of expectations.
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It’s ridiculous, how can you morally condemn a service which provides access to allow people to
make their own informed decisions out of their own free will?
If you can’t look after your money then it’s better off in someone else’s pocket.
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Congrats Freetrade team on the launch - I think this is brilliant for the business and a great business model to pursue.
I’m a Freetrade user and investor as well as a HL customer where my ISA sits - and my opinion is probably formed by being a HL customer for so long. I do intend on moving my ISA to Freetrade with an expanded stock univserse and features like limit orders, so Plus really resonates for me on a features-perspective. However, regarding pricing, on HL I’ll pay £12 buy, £12 sell for a trade, I think the clear, transparent £10 a month model works great (the equivalent of just 5 HL trades per year!) and I think will entice a lot of HL (and other traditional brokers) customers over - which I imagine would mean for a large portion of these people therefore makes what’s paywalled pretty trivial.
Potentially an unpopular opinion, however, I’d agree with a comment further up which discussed putting whole markets behind the Plus paywall. I almost think everything but all UK stocks, Nasdaq100 and S&P500 is reasonable.
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Plenty of people make choices on this basis all the time, I am far from alone. Like everyone else I work hard for my money and choose where and how to use it. I am lucky enough to be in a position where I can be choosy about the how as well as the when and I firmly believe I can handle my money thanks.
I’m ducking out of this conversation now as its sidetracking the thread
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Am I the only person that’s always thought that limiting access to certain markets would be great for Freetrade?
Give everyone access to the FTSE100/250, FAANG and renewable energy/other green companies and then keep AIM and foreign markets within Freetrade Plus. The monthly fee is a reasonable gatekeeper to only let those through who will get value from it/who are ready.
I’d never owned any shares before Freetrade and now I have an account worth well over 0.03% of a million pounds! Seriously though, I’ve learnt a lot on my journey and in these forums and am at the point where I’d feel ready to pay the monthly subscription for more market access.
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I think thats the nail on the head there @Lee, Alpha is pitched at competition from brokers like HL charging per trade, not necessarily T212
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It wasn’t even that deep it’s that whoever started demonising Trading212 went on a moral crusade about how awful the platform is instead of pointing fingers at any other group of the responsible people, IE
UK Government / FCA for regulating CFDs
ESMA for regulating EU CFDs
Irresponsible people who are naive enough to spend their money gambling on CFDs
The platform isn’t the problem and I never said it wasn’t right to have ethics but on the other hand it seems that we as FT should foot the bill for being morally sound individuals?
I’m not sure that it is true that T212 use free share trading as a loss leader any more. Pretty sure that they have said relatively recently that was no longer true and that their invest account was self-sustaining from income from interest and now share lending.
That aside as a FT investor I’m delighted that some people think FT+ works for them. My concern is that too much of the FT+ offer is available for free elsewhere. Will enough people be convinced to pay £9.99/month? I’d rather features/information that were reserved for + were things that were different to free offerings from elsewhere.
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In other news, beautiful logo…
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I think Limit order should be available to everyone simply because of the amount of complaints on this forum about not getting the exact price that was displayed on the order screen. Limit orders would give more control on the max someone is prepared to pay
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