Iām after a bit of clarification over something.
The following prices are just an example, but the situation is accurate.
Say I place an instant buy of UK stock @ Ā£20 for example.
The stock price rice increases to Ā£25.75 and this is shown in Freetrade.
I place an instant sell order at that price shown in Freetrade, I review the order which shows Ā£25.75 and confirm the sell @ Ā£25.75.
I then get a āSell Completeā showing the sell went through at Ā£24.45.
Why have my shares not sold at the price shown on the confirmation screen?
This has happened a couple of times and caused me to be down on a stock.
The prices are purely indicative and up to 15 mins delayed. If you want to know more accurately (or the stock is very volatile) use a live price through Google or Yahoo finance and it will always execute at the best price at that moment.
Prices are estimated at all times, it says that during the process of buying and selling. So whilst it says Ā£25.75 that isnāt necessarily the price youāll get.
What others have said is accurate. Live pricing is not currently offered on :freetrade:, due to cost. As well as this, use limit orders. The price can change between you tapping buy or sell and the transaction being carried out. Even if takes only a few seconds. Limit orders will only execute at the price per share you set. Assuming the market conditions - the price is reached and thereās demand at that price/availability to buy - are met, of course.
Do yourself a favour and stick Ā£4k in a Plus ISA account so you get limit buy/sell orders and then the interest on the extra cash will cancel out the fees (more or less) just donāt yolo away the 4k
My theory is that they wanted to make an app that was simple, and theyāve made it too simple. Thereās a certain amount of complexity that is inherent to stock trading and probably shouldnāt be glossed over.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Albert Einstein, maybe.
You can argue that if youāre holding a stock for a year plus that sort of thing is unimportant. Personally I think it should be optional to see it at least, maybe click to expand type of thing.
Einstein put his Nobel prize winnings in stocks and lost it all .
If you target the app at inexperienced āinvestorsā who are going to do 90% of their work on the app, then the app needs to deliver more to avoid the newbie questions, particularly bid/offer spread.
If youāre targeting experienced investors who will have spent 99% of their time using multiple third party tools, live prices and level 2 order books then fine, keep it simple, but then you need to be more precise with the contract prices.
Might be missing something here. Iād consider myself a more experienced investor, but I couldnāt care less about level 2 order books or (for the most part ) āliveā pricing.
It very much depends how your investing, if your more frequently trading or long term investing etc.
Different platforms offer different things, on a stock that is less liquid it will look like this how many people are buying and at which prices and how many people are selling and at which prices.
So if on yahoo price or Google or investing. Com is showing only last transaction price, I belive investing. Com do a good job at showing bid and ask price as well but on the desktop platform.
By the time you try to buy at 1254.50 which was the last sold price the whole position could have been sold and when you buy you ended up buying the next one up 1254.75
The above example is on a illiquid stocks and an order can take 10min to fill that is when somone is happy to move up the bid price to match the ask.
On FB Legal And General they have many many transactions per second so its a different beast but the principle is the same.
I am new to this app having come from HL. I occasionally check prices against HL which give you an actual live / deal price to be accepted. Whenever I have done this but then made the transaction on this app I have found the Freetrade price as good or slightly better than the HL price at the same time.
I have a different grievance which is how they value your investment on this app: it seems to be by buy price. That doesnāt make any sense: the shares I own are only of value in terms of their sale price, not what it would cost me to buy them a second time. Why would I be doing that?
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