Today I was sat on the bus and sold one of my free shares, wasn’t one I was interested in and I thought I’d cash it in. A few mins later I’d seen my “since you started investing” had crashed by a pound.
Turns out I accidentally sold the share instantly, this is no big deal and is completely my own doing. But what I’m most annoyed is that it’s now showing as a loss for me when in reality the value of my assets hasn’t fundamentally changed. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to me, especially as I use this feature to track the aggregate value of the changes in my portfolio.
In the future would it be possible to either remove commission fees from this figure or be able to chose between several different options?
I personally prefer to know what my accounts true return is, so prefer to see costs incurred factored in. Maybe a toggle for those that prefer another way but definitely a ways down thd line. Lots of other things to address first.
I do think we should see the true cost of our investment decisions, including taxes and trading fees. Otherwise you could start at ÂŁ100, trade 100 x at ÂŁ1 a trade and lose almost all your money, but still be showing a profit if you ignore fees.
Other platforms can be quite frustrating because they only show you the profit/loss on your particular investments at that moment, but don’t show you how you’re actually doing in reality because they ignore previous trades or fees etc. so after a few years you can completely lose track of how you’re doing. It’s very easy to forget past losses and just concentrate on winners, and I think it’s nice Freetrade reminds you what your total position is. The way I see it here, the value of your assets has changed, they are down by £1, though I suspect you don’t consider anything but stocks an asset?
Like many of the decisions in freetrade, I think this was made to encourage investors to consider better ways to invest (the Insights tab features cash and bonds prominently for example, or the graphs being shown in % so that people don’t think about meaningless share prices in £ or $). Insights has certainly made me rethink the allocation of investments a bit (though I don’t have a lot in freetrade yet), I like the % graphs, and I really love this feature which is annoying you (showing all time growth minus costs), precisely because it gives a realistic picture. When they expand the info available like market cap, yield etc I hope they put similar thought into what to show.
Your assets include cash - you should probably always have some cash, and normally some bonds as part of your portfolio (though bonds are pretty terrible right now). For example Berkshire Hathaways is around 25% in cash or short term bonds at the moment (something like $128 billion).