Hi
As the title says. This is a constant issue and perhaps a deal breaker for me.
Over the past three weeks I have been investing, I have made numerous trades that should be profitable, going off quote, okay to find that they execute for 0.5-1% less than the quoted price.
I am losing around £10-15 per trade over what I am expecting.
Are the quotes delayed or inaccurate?
The price that is displayed is not a quote but is an indicative price. UK listed securities will have a 15minute delay from when the last price was received. US securities are close to real time but also not a quoted price. When you submit an instant order FT’s platform will go out to market and trade at the best price it can receive for you within a reasonable spread
Perhaps you may find FT Plus useful so you can make use of Limit orders to ensure you are trading at a price you are happy with.
Also the FX fee perhaps? That normally starts me off down slightly.
Are you taking into account the bid-ask spread? I think Freetrade displays the mid price
It’s not really the best platform if you are trying to scalp small percentages. It’s better for longer or medium term trades where you are looking for bigger percentage gains.
The point remains that if you execute the trade at the same time on FT as other platforms you will get the same price though.
That’s true. I think the main issue is the price displayed. If it’s a mid price and the price you are paying is the ask price it looks like you lost something. the reason I think other platforms might be better for this sort of scalping is they display Bid and ask prices. The OP states that a 0.5-1% difference is making a profit into a loss so he does seem to be trying to scalp tiny profits. TBH I think he’d be better using a spread betting platform for that.
The price displayed is the most recent (15 minute delayed) price, which could be either a buy or sell. If it’s showing a sell price then the buy price will be higher, but the price could also have changed in those 15 minutes.
There are also other factors which affect your gains:
I find more luck buying and selling while looking at the price on yahoo finance.
It matches quite well most of the time.
Try what Leito said as I do that or apple stocks app or tradingview, especially the price when market opens it will still show the price from the previous day when market closed for like the first 5 mins which can be annoying when you want the freetrade app to refresh.
Thanks all
I knew it was a quote price as it does say but perhaps there should be a disclaimer about the fact that the prices are delayed.
Dismayed to hear that as on my first day of trading I sold a stock that had me £100 in the green and when it executed I was £300 down.
If it had been made clear that the prices were delayed I would not have executed that trade without checking another app.
Until reading this post I had not been able to work out what had gone wrong. I assumed I had just been so unlucky that the price had drastically changed as I hit sell. Only now am I hearing it’s a known limitation of Freetrade.
The time of the last price is displayed in each stock page
This doesn’t sound right at all. US stock prices aren’t that far behind and LSE prices are only a maximum of 15 minutes delayed, very unlikely to change to significantly in such a short period. Unless you were trading a stock where the price was changing at an extreme pace.
What stock was it? Have you checked your sale against the prices at the time to make sure the price was reasonable?
Check
It’s fairly normally across the board. HL offer live pricing if your a customer and turn it on. But all pricing from all brokers are indicative.
What would be good is an offer window from freetrade like a few other brokers do. E.g 15 seconds to accept the offer
+£100 to -£300 wouldn’t be unrealistic if it was a last holding (esp now you can trade up to £25k at a time for US stocks.
Been a long time since I signed up to FT, but I wonder whether a notice or something informing the new user of this could be helpful.
True if you sold $20k worth then a £400 change in 5 minutes on $20k isn’t that much
They do, but I expect hardly anyone actually reads the execution policy
Maybe they need it as a notification you have to tick that you acknowledge before proceeding? Would be good to have a tutorial of the app when you first join anyway.
But again, if you you have £20K invested and you are trying to take profit at just £100 up you are scalping small percentages. You need Live prices and you need to see bid and ask prices if you are trading that way. Freetrade is a great investing app but it isn’t suited to scalping
I mean… I wasn’t going to say 
but yeah, other side of the coin, selling $20k of stocks for a £100 gain seems inadvisable.
Buy perhaps going off topic a bit. I did wonder if it was a poor price, it is possible it seems to have happened once maybe twice in the past though it seems very rare. hence checking against the prices at the time.
This topic was automatically closed 416 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
