No US buying today

Yes, i can see no downsides to outing the bank involved. None.

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Lots of UK gems for the taking

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Welcome to the free market. If you make shitty decisions and people don’t like it, that’s your fault. Stop protecting suits and banks who don’t care about you.

Totally agree. Name them.

I was being sarcastic. Wow.

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If the bank thinks it’s made a fair decision, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want their name to be public? Could you explain


Whichever bank it was in the UK they’ve had their orders from across the pond


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Whether the decision is felt to be fair or otherwise, FT is in a precarious position having only one FX provider.

After this kerfuffle dies down I’m sure they’ll look to find backups and contingencies and alternatives and all that jazz, but if they were to publicly name the organisations involved, do you think that would have no repercussions? It’s one thing to limit for a day, what if they decide to limit forever?

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Me? Good question. I would clearly say “Our provider or providers XY sent us this communication “
” so we’re sorry we at the moment this is the situation. We are now looking at alternatives to mitigate the current situation as soon as possible and be sure this cannot happen again.”

It’s about time to make people and companies accountable, always, clearly. So the next time they’ll have to think twice about doing something that might actually ruin their business.

And also because the FX company that Freetrade uses (apparently from another topic CurrencyCloud -used also by Starling and Revolut), maybe they also got another company that blocked them, and being them exposed they would expose themselves the company that blocked them, and so on.

A lot of things keep happening because we’re afraid of making people or companies publicly accountable, because is not politically correct. Let’s always make clearly the names.

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I get you and on reflection my slightly sarcastic tone probably wasn’t warranted.

I hope the bank is dead to FT though. Seriously, I hope the team isn’t sending polite emails asking for FX to be unrestricted and instead has launched a new workstream of finding a new FX provider who won’t shit on retail investors.

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Transparency is key here because this isn’t going away anytime soon.

(Edit) I meant transparency on who gave these orders for us to be restricted from U.S markets.

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Don’t worry, FT are nothing if not tenacious and innovative. They will find a way of handling this suitably.

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I get your point, and I’m certain Freetrade are all for accountability (as any long term follower of the company would attest) and of course too often information is hidden behind smoke and mirrors. Freetrade do currently have to have a working relationship with this company though and thus can’t be seen to be throwing them under the bus by bad mouthing a service they rely on to their customer base. Freetrade know that the info is available and that Currencycloud and apparently Barclays (the names that keep getting mentioned) are going to take a lot of criticism for this - and so they should - as this is due to them, not Freetrade (except for the potential shortfall of relying on just one partner). It isn’t ‘political correctness’ that has stopped Viktor, et al, naming names, but professional practise. I’m sure they are working to try to get the US markets back today if at all possible by talking to these partners and trying to get them to reconsider such a ridiculous decision, but if they saw Freetrade throwing their name out there directly to us retail investors who are rightly seething, this would undermine any negotiating position surely?

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From another thread


Realise this isn’t freetrades decision and I’m sure they are spitting feathers on behalf of everyone here. They get the frustration though. But they need to work things through with the provider. Whatever the reason was that the provider chose to do this.

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Accountability for Thee but not for Me

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Crazy that Trading 212 and REVOLUT (of all companies) are still working


I agree, I think is a fine balance, but FT where thrown under the bus by a company, and they should do the same. Otherwise they’ll do it again. And while doing that, they should already be searching for another company, so that CC or Barclays or whoever know they are not the only ones and can’t play too much.

Services like Freetrade are born to be disruptive against a status quo, and so even now that they’re growing (and they deserve it more and more), they should keep that disruptive and completely open approach.

Like you I think FT is accountable only for one thing: relying on a single provider, but is a big problem for users to know FT put their eggs all in one basket. That’s something that I hope will change very soon, and names will be public from now on, so is not about throwing anyone under the bus in moments like this, but to prevent them to happen and make everyone accountable from the start of anything negative that might happen in the future.

And building trust with users once again. I love FT and I hope they’ll do it, but in this instance they’ll need a much more clear position than the one they had till now.

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Sell orders won’t be processed until 1st Feb at the earliest? WTF?

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Yeah I’ve got same problem, the whole US market is a hit and miss today on FT.

I really think they’ll need a lot of good PR and counter actions over weekend to explain to users how is possible the built a system relying on a single company for processing US market.

We’re talking about the single most important market on the planet, surely they need to think this again and spread the load on more than a single company.