I bought stock over an hour ago which has just been stuck as “Awaiting confirmation”.
I saw the in app message just - which is fair to expect a short delay (it was 5 mins or so yesterday) - but OVER AN HOUR of not knowing whether you purchased a stock or at what price, meanwhile the price is dropping and because it’s not even in your account you can’t sell?
Is that even legal to not tell someone whether you purchased a stock or not and then withhold the ability to trade it for potentially hours?
I’ll be keeping detailed records of this and pursue with the Ombudsman for a share of the loss (a fair share from being completely in the dark for what’s going on 70-80 minutes now and still counting…)
Yes - seems fair to me to share the loss equally? They haven’t told me if I’ve successfully purchased, at what price, or allowed me to access the stock to do anything with for almost 90 minutes… How is that acceptable during a volatile market? There is no other broker that I can’t trade on right now, I’m in 2 other accounts absolutely fine. I pay for a premium account where I can use stop losses, which I’ve not been able to do.
There are dozens of volatile stocks today - what does it matter? How is being completely blind as to whether I’ve purchased something or not acceptable? I literally pay for the ability to use a stop loss with Freetrade, yet I’m not even able find out if I purchased a stock or not for 90 minutes - that’s laughable.
Edit: Well after over 90 minutes (or was it this post that sped it up…?) it finally updated, the order didn’t go through. This has highlighted major issues with Freetrade though. It’s impossible to use an app where it’s a mystery if you’ve purchased a stock for 90 minutes.
How is that acceptable during a volatile market? I would say that is the only time it is acceptable. If you want to play with fire during periods of extremely volatility (yesterday we saw the most volume since 2008) you should expect their to be problems and plan accordingly.
So anything that’s remotely popular we are going to struggle buying and selling ? How does anything get done, I understand it’s not freetrades fault but if that’s the case why would anyone even risk large sums of money on a good thing knowing that it’s normal to lose money when you come to cash in your shares ?
You shouldn’t risk large sums of money on unprecedentedly volatile stocks. Freetrade is faring much better than most at still remaining operational and processing orders at such a time
There’s nothing normal about trading activity over the last few days. Established and very large brokerages have broke completely, suffered outages, removed particular stocks, stopped on boarding new customers and now ended up in class action law suits all in the space of the last 24 to 48 hours. Take a look around, you’ll see this is by no means normal.
Freetrade gaining more than 10% of new users in one day is not normal but things actually seem to be fairing well for most. US trades are handled by a third party who has been under immense pressure by the looks of things and that’s why freetrade put out the message earlier about delayed notifications.
If you’re going to invest you need to do your own research and that goes for the brokerage world as much as the shares you want to invest in. Freetrade has remained resiliant in all of this. By no means perfect, and definite areas for improvement but they’ve tried to be as open as they can.
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Sentinelgre
(The Spaniel in my photo is Archie)
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I’m kind of new to this stuff so sorry if I’m off-base but wouldn’t you want to place a limit buy if you don’t want to pay more than a certain amount? In a volatile market it seems to be that it would be impossible to guarantee when and at what price the order is fulfilled right?
