I’m a big fan of Freetrade but recently have found that the reviewed price when both buying and selling has been quite a lot different to the price I’ve received when the trade has been made.
I understand the spread and that things can change but when I trade with Charles Stanley I get 15 seconds window or so to agree the price and that is then the price I get.
Would this be possible for Freetrade?
It’s frustrating and expensive to make trades when you think you’ll get one price and you get a less favourable one.
The 15-second countdown behaviour you mention is unique to the UK ‘RSP’ (retail service provider) network and is not the normal way market orders are executed in stock exchanges, where you would specify an amount to buy/sell and would receive the best market price at the time of the order (without seeing it first).
Alongside UK-listed shares and ETFs, we already provide trading in US shares, including fractionals, and our aim is to provide trading across many global exchanges in the future. So, to ensure you get the best possible share prices, access to innovative features like fractionals, and a consistent, unified experience, we’ve chosen not to optimise for the unique RSP quoting system.
We will, however, continue to make sure the price you see as an estimate when reviewing your trade is as close as possible to the price you receive for the trade. How close it is will depend on a number of factors, such as the liquidity of the stock in question.
I do think the price delay and difference when buying stocks is an issue for a lot of users. Seems a recurring issue in the google play store reviews, the FT score there has now dropped to 3.9/5. Seems the most common issues for people are the lack of instant deposits and the price being shown never being what they actually get. Even if FT just made it more explicitly clear to customers that there is a 15min delay on the prices it might be better as they probably don’t see the disclaimer at the bottom of the stock pages.
