Are there any figures you can share Viktor on how many instant trades are placed by Freetrade users ?
I understand if not.
Personally Iâve done around 10 instant trades when prices dropped on ETFâs that I will hold long term.
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Viktor, thatâs all very sensible. But in this case, it was BP shares, which leads be to believe this was a technical error.
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Thanks, Han.
@CEY posted a response from the COps team that confirms they looked into it, and it was a best execution-related issue, emphasis from me:
Apologies for the delay here, Iâve just looked into this for you and there wasnât anyone who was willing to offer a reasonable price when we tried to complete your order, so we didnât make the order, to ensure that you didnât get a bad deal.
One potential reason is, the order size may not have been big enough. A tendency of stock exchanges is that you receive better prices for bigger orders: kind of similar to business transactions.
Another potential reason is, liquidity is not constant. There are moments when even large stocks are not liquid, and there can be many reasons for that.
In order to understand what happened to a specific trade, just ping us on the in-app chat, and weâll investigate. But itâs not too productive to dwell on a specific trade like this here.
That said, we fully appreciate how frustrating rejected orders are. Being a tech company, weâre considering an engineering solution, but Iâll let our product managers chime in when they see this thread. 
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I am very sorry I have misunderstood FT idea of basic orders and this is maybe my fault I agree. I am happy to be wrong if it helps me to understand the reality.
I thought as pointed out earlier â If I click on sell for 4pm my trades get executed and the fact I opt in with a basic trade means to me that I take all the risk that during my sell or buy prices can change (like it works on other brokers if you click on buy or sell).
I didnât know that FT decides on my behalf what is reasonable and decides for me YES or NO for my trade. I think FT needs to make this a bit clear that your trade might not be executed if FT team decides that its a bad deal compared to other offers in the market.
I hope I understood that right but if this is the case sorry I was a bit mislead by the product offered to me and I can see from the responses so are many other FT users.
Thanks for clarifying and I know something know that I didnât know before and maybe I should have asked and researched how these basic trades work. THe last thing I imaged was that there are humans at the other end deciding for me. I genuinely thought these things are automatic.
Not sure if I want to keep investing with FT knowing this now.
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Maybe if Freetrade offered an option (i.e. a tick box or switch) to choose to accept the best price offered, irrespective of the price AND make this an opt in choice (default could remain as is the current functionality) that would satisfy everyone?
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I am afraid COBS 11.2A.2 has taken care of that and you cannot âopt outâ of best execution without violating FCAâs rules.
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Iâm no expert on these rules, but if the best price Freetrade can obtain is lower than other prices being offered in the market due to (for example as suggested above) selling a smaller number of shares - that should be acceptable.
- (2) The execution factors to be taken into account are price, costs, speed, likelihood of execution and settlement, size, nature or any other consideration relevant to the execution of an order.
Fair point, but interestingly, this is more likely to be the reason why the best price is not achieved:
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But do you know if failures occur on other platforms? Iâve used % based platforms like Cavendish and never had a failure on those although they also run in batch at the end of the day alsoâŠalthough I did do less frequent buys there
this is one of the reasons why i stopped using freetrade two buy requests were cancelled without any reason on very popular stock i understand the reasons behind these cancellations iâve read the FAQ but it still doesnât bode well for using Freetrade as your regular trading app
i now use a different one and iâve not had a single problem with them i trade shares quite regualrly mostly buying at the moment but i can see a time when i may want to sell and and reliability is essential.
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At Freetrade we fully appreciate that rejected orders can be frustrating. In order to improve the customer experience around this weâre looking into retries of basic orders in the event that order rejections occur and providing reasons in app to explain why a rejection has occurred.
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Hey everyone guess what happened today at 4pm ⊠haha I think I am going mad âŠ
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I have an idea:
FT could you please publicly disclose your mathematical model that guides your decision rejecting order(s). Before I tapped on sell I even went into the FT chat and bagged not to reject my order at 4pm. I was told that happens automatic and FT has no control over this.
I have also learned now that FT seems not not get the best deal sometimes compared to other market prices and hence âautomaticallyâ decides to reject (in order to protect their costumers).
So can FT please tell me/us what is your automatic model that helps you guys to determine YES or NO ? Is is based on a certain % ? Who set that % ?
Is it based on the order size ? So how much is enough for an order to be seen by your model as an OK order? I understand some of my orders are with small monies but that means in turn that if you have very little FT is not really for you. Maybe there are others like me out there who want to build up their portfolio pound by pound âŠ
I donât want to drift now so:
Please explain to us what mathematical model you use in your background that helps you guys to decide reject or not reject ? This could help me or others to understand these basic orders a bit more.
Wouldnât this be part of their IP? I wouldnât expect them to just publicly disclose the internal workings for their financial systems.
Something along those lines â We have a set % which determines IN or OUT is IP ? I just want to understand the basics here and not be referred to something vague such as âIn the best interest of the consumerâ ⊠I just want to understand how this actually works and what are the fundamentals for FT that determine YES or NO.
I am sure there are other people here that are keen to learn this ?
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[Edit 
]
Meanwhile, the stock you were trying to buyâBPâ has shaky fundamentals. Tons of debt, continuing investments in 
while going after the renewables market, a CEO replacement, dividend pressures, and the list goes on.
We could be spending more time discussing this and help more people. Re: your basic orders, talk to the ops team directly via DM please.
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Please grab a beer, itâs Friday
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Small point, OP is trying to sell, not buy.
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I donât think you are really adding anything to this discussion if I am honest.
P.S I contacted FT team via the chat as I pointed out earlier (you should really read comments here and its about selling) I was told to try it again tomorrow. But I am still interested in the fundamentals of how these basic orders work and how the decision is actually made to reject and order.
I am having a beer already btw thank you all good
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If you want to learn more about how best execution works, you can find and read the actual legislation by searching Google. There are a number of factors the broker is asked to consider.
I think itâs unlikely youâll get the detailed answer you want from Freetrade - as @Eden says, this is likely to be considered sensitive information that they wouldnât want to release to the public.
The nutshell answer - that they look to sell at the market price, and reject offers that are too far outside of the spread - is perhaps as detailed as youâre going to get.
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