You’re right, I meant not derivatives, but US stocks. Will edit to clarify 
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Thanks, so I assume you have to be a banking customer to invest - it won’t be standalone then?
Yes, you’ll need an account
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great, I’ll save my time watching it - as I just opened a Monzo and have no need for another account
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Wondering how they are going zero commissions and FX spot rate.
Are they going to absorb costs?
Probably yes, just as they do with the currency exchange at the moment. Not sure about the sustainability of such a strategy though.
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Chances are if you are on a free plan and dabble into stock picking, one day or another you may want to do more than 3 trades/month and end up paying additional fees or subscribe to a paying membership. They mentioned they are aiming for financial sustainability for this service
Doesn’t matter how much you hate Revolut, this is bad news for Freetrade. Personally, I am fairly neutral towards them - they offer a very useful service for currency exchange, but I would never use them as a bank. I think this lack of trust will also preclude many people from using them to trade/invest in shares.
Nevertheless, once launched they are a direct competitor - it will be very interesting to compare the UI and functionality vs Freetrade.
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I’m not so sure it is a negative. Competition can be very helpful in educating customers about the benefits of a product. Revolut will help shine a light on the high prices of incumbent stock brokers and could drive an interest in “free trading” for both Revolut and Freetrade. Yes it will keep the Freetrade team on their toes, but that’s always a good thing. 
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Depends on exactly how Revolut market it.
If they go out of their way to educate about long term investing and have ISAs then it will take some customers away.
But if not then it’ll just be a cheap platform for traders rather than investors, or people who will by a couple of shares in a big name like Apple and do no more.
Still a case of watch and wait in my opinion
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Because there is only 1 bank, only 1 supermarket, only 1 fast food restaurant, only 1 car manufacturer etc.
Revolut is entering the market space, not monopolising it. Chill and let Freetrade deal with the competition which we all knew was coming, if not revolut then someone else.
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Hiring spree 
I am so chill about Revolut, their customer support sucks. Every time something goes wrong it takes hours to explain and every time there is a new person who needs to hear it again and again.
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It’s why I’m a bit worried that putting resources into going abroad to foreign markets when we’ve not even all the ftse 100 stocks on FT seems to be putting FT at risk. While the app is great it remains exceedingly basic. If Revolut fire up a free trading platform with 3,000 odd stocks and a good analysis I wonder how many customers freetrade will have left? How many more would go to free trade over Revolut? If they throw a team together of 100 or 200 staff it could be done quite quickly im sure.
That said I think the experts at Freetrade who not only know more than me but have a lot more to lose know what they are doing and therefore I trust them to make the right calls.
I imagine HL and the other big boys will.be even more worried. Who would bank on HL dominating the investing market in 10 years time? Plenty of customers out there locked up in the big boys to share around
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I assume a lot of the work for European expansion is based on regulations and translations since the app will basically be the same (except for the need to accept Euros) and that a lot of resources at the moment are focused on the investment platform to allow the number of stocks to expand
Also Revolut won’t have European fractionals so it’s not comparing 2 companies who do the same thing
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I’m not worried about Revolut as competition for freetrade for these reasons:
- Customer support - they effectively don’t have any, FT can compete on this alone
- Trust - they have a trust deficit which is growing due to scandals and their internal culture
- Lack of focus - they have so many features in their app it’s becoming confusing, and it will be hard for their team to keep up given all the different areas they’re trying to execute on.
- Huge number of customers - they simply have too many to support properly, this leads to a poor customer experience.
- Timing - they have taken a long time to get this ready, which suggests it’s not been as easy as they thought.
They are likely to attract people who want to day trade, people who have used revolut for crypto or FX for example in the past, I don’t think they’re going to attract many people interested in long term investment from HL or Freetrade - the trust issue alone is a huge barrier for people moving their life savings. I certainly wouldn’t touch Revolut for anything important.
I do think HL will be worried, but they should be more worried about Freetrade, Degiro, Vanguard and Robinhood say than about competitors like Revolut. HL also have a trust issue, which is unlikely to go away, and a problem if there is a recession, because of their reliance on income from pushing customers to expensive managed funds, a problem most of those competitors don’t have.
In terms of focus for freetrade, as far as I know they’re working on their new investment platform now, prior to rollout into other countries, and it will allow them to more easily add stocks, though I feel like for long term investment they actually have a pretty good selection, it wouldn’t hurt to offer more full coverage of the UK market and offer some exposure to the larger European markets as they expand. I’d say they need to execute on a few things this year, and then they’ll be pretty secure:
- Raise lots of money (
) - Grow user base to a sustainable level ( in progress)
- New platform to reduce costs and make features easier (in progress)
- More complete coverage of the UK and US markets
- Information about stocks in app (dividend yield, market cap etc)
- A few requested features like Limit orders, Fractional Shares etc
- Expand into Europe
- Later products like Pensions etc as there is a lot of money there paying high fees
I’m not sure how much of that will be covered by the new platform, but hopefully that will be sorted out soon and they can start adding features to the app again. I assume that, the fundraising and a focus on growth are the reason we’ve seen a bit less progress on the app recently.
Brexit or war with Iran may complicate the European expansion and the resulting recession may unfortunately put people off investing and markets, that’s the big unknown at this point and a far bigger risk IMO than Revolut.
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I think they’re waiting to use their banking license before they launch regular banking services. Just checked the FCA and they’re still using the emoney license, weren’t they supposed to have been using the Lithuanian one by now?
This is probably something I’ve forgotten, but whose license are they using for the trading? Always more tricky to launch something if you need to clear it with a 3rd party
They’ve been building that payments processor for 21 months so far. Either it’s going to be epic or it’s more Revolut spin
They can’t even do a half decent web interface for business banking. I think it took more effort to make it as bad as it is than it would have taken to make it usable
Funny you say that. I remember reading they have already signed up 100K+ business customers.
Not saying they have a bad business account, just a bad web interface