New US Stocks coming soon on Freetrade 🇺🇸

[finki]

Lots of “Costs and Charges” pages set up on Freetrade for stocks not currently available in the stock universe.

Guessing these stocks are coming soon?

https://finki.io/Freetrade_New_US.html

[TomShepherd]

Hey @finki

Thank you so much for posting this. Whether they come or not, this is interesting to skim through.

[Plutyre47]

I am a very happy Freetrade user so don’t get me wrong in asking this, however I do get frustrated in coming across what looks like a promising stock only to find it isn’t yet in the FT stock universe.
Sure, we can request for a particular stock to be added, but that then becomes subject to a voting system which by definition advances a stock’s case according to how high-profile the stock is.
I fancy myself as a value investor, looking for the hidden gems (of course at the moment everything is a value stock so it’s all good - at the moment …!). That sometimes means going for a stock that’s ‘off the beaten track’.
Recently I came across a German chemical company Lanxess AG (LNXSF) that’s listed on the OTC exchange. Apparently Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway are an investor … Then there was Genasys Inc (GNSS), a US healthcare company listed on Nasdaq. This one’s bucking the market trend and is currently up 5.2% since 1 Jan 2020. Finally there’s Veeva Systems (VEEV) listed on the NYSE. This company provides proprietary equipment and software to the healthcare sector. Once again, this one’s up 7% since the start of this year.
Of course there are great stocks all over the place; and these three don’t represent a ‘make-or-break’ for me. I also know I have the choice to use brokers other than FT. But I like Freetrade. I like the values, the UI, the community…, and (ask my Mrs) I’m loyal through and through. Only one football team for me (MK Dons of course), and only one broker.
So, like many a football fan through the ages, I will wait for Jerusalem, Alpha, or whatever you want to call that great day when the FT stocks universe gets greatly expanded.
Meanwhile, can anyone explain why it is taking so long to happen? I just want to know something of the process, or obtain some understanding of where the bottleneck is. Is it regulatory? commercial? technological? Can anyone ease my angst on this question …?

[deathwaltz]

I like Freetrade for their values, community, etc too - but to wait for one’s chosen stocks to be added whilst the opportunity of a decade (lifetime?) plays out is just too much to ask, sorry.

I think a fair compromise would be to use a different broker for the foreseeable, then transfer back to Freetrade when they have the stock universe fleshed out.

[Plutyre47]

Good point. I will probably do that. Thanks.

[Freetrade_Team]

Hi @Plutyre47 and @deathwaltz, we can assure you that the new US stocks are definitely on their way!

The first phase will be 250, which you can read more about here. These include big names, and highly-requested stocks, like Virgin Galactic, Sonos and Costco.

This has taken a little longer than we expected, mainly from a technical perspective. The work is quite closely linked to our development work for fractionals, which @Duncan gave an update on a few days ago:

Fractions for all

Hi everyone As promised, I want to provide an update on delivering fractional investment in US shares. Firstly, this has taken longer than we anticipated - it’s a hugely important feature for us as it is for you all, and I love how excited everyone is to get their hands on it. We want to build it in a way that the feature can scale to hundreds of thousands of customers, which has various aspects, ranging from supporting corporate actions to regulatory requirements. You’ve probably read our bl…

Thanks for your patience, and we’ll update you as soon as we have more news!

[TomShepherd]

Hi @Freetrade_Team thanks for the conformation re: the next batch of stocks are still coming in a few weeks. Please could we have a list of them. If it is 250 I assume you know what they are? I know Kinki put a list of possibles on the forum recently.

[Plutyre47]

thanks, Sam. I suppose I skipped past those updates without reading them.
As it says at the start of @Duncan’s article, it wasn’t that long ago when the mere idea of free stock investing would have been considered fantastical. Now here we are, and already taking it not only for granted but clamouring for more, more, more.
You’ve been good enough to explain it has to do with overcoming the challenges of building your own proprietary software in order to maintain integrity with FT’s founding principles; that’s all I wanted to know. I’ll wait patiently and continue cheering you on from the sidelines. Thanks.

[finki]

@TomShepherd

I know Kinki put a list of possibles on the forum recently.

Magic

[TomShepherd]

Haha oooops sorry @Finki! Many apologies. This reminds me of a story from my childhood. Year 7 IT class. The teacher asked us to set up IT accounts on the computers which of course needed a password. He said once we had set these up he would come around and write our password down in case we forgot them - this was big deal and a big moment as I had never done anything like this before (this is roughly 1997). As a Manchester City fan, at the time, my favourite player was a Georgian legend called Georgio Kinkladze. So I tried to enter Kinkladze (giggity) as my password. However much to my frustration this was rejected for being too long. I tried a shortened nickname that I used to use for Kinkladze and bosh it worked.Sorted. When the IT teacher, Mr Trevors, came to take my password I wrote it down on a piece of paper for him, as everyone else had. However, instead of simply moving on to the next student, he looked at what I had written and asked me to step outside with him. He asked me why I had chosen the password I had, I simply explained that I tried to use Kinkladze as my password after my favourite Man City player, so that it is easy to remember, but it was too many characters so I have used his nickname. He looked down at the piece of paper and then looked slightly relieved, he smiled said that was fine and we walked back in. I was so puzzled as to what had just happened, I did not ask what the issue was, I was very shy (then), so I just cracked on. But as a chronic over thinker, even as a youngster, this was something that stuck in my mind for a really long time as being really strange behaviour from Mr Trevors. It was literally years later, for no real reason that the penny dropped that I had written Kinky down on the piece of paper. And then it all made sense.

I have plenty of stories like this. If anyone else suffers from chronic insomnia, do let me know.

[Edz33]

Hi Can you please add Illumina stock, this company is making major strides in its industry.

[HarryG (Harry)]

Any news on European stocks? LVMH, Danone, Nestle etc?

[Viktor]

@HarryG

Any news on European stocks?

The first rule of the virtual meetup.

[Viktor]

@Edz33

Hi Can you please add Illumina stock

We can confirm it’s in the 250 batch.

[Jonny]

@Viktor

The first rule of the virtual meetup.

what have i missed