Shocked by my savings made on FT

Stumbled across this by accident, but itā€™s truly eye opening :crazy_face:

Iā€™ve just started using Simply Wallstreet for analysing my portfolio, as recommended by someone on here. If you havenā€™t tried it give it a go - really useful info, and they have a deal on at the moment so works out about Ā£5 a month.

When setting this up I had to input all my trades over the last twelve months. And this is where the eye opening moment was. In 12 months I have done 156 individual trades, and these have cost me nothing apart from stamp duty. Had I done these trades with my old broker Halifax it would have set me back Ā£1,870

Now I know due to Free Trading I do lots more small trades, things I never would have done with Halifax @ Ā£11.99 a trade. But even so, Ā£1,870 - wow.

Has anyone saved even more in fees in 2019? Would be good to see who holds the record :grinning:

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I hate to think how much Iā€™ve spent in trading fees over the last 20 years. It would be a painful figure in these days of :freetrade:, T212.

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I saved over a grand in November aloneā€¦

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You trade too often. Even Warren Buffet will trade much less despite having billions to invest

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Thatā€™s because Buffett has a different strategy. He holds enormous amounts of cash too. Iā€™m still learning, but I am trying to buy low and sell high, but not all my portfolio at any one time so I always have entries and exits on positions over time. Its worked very nicely so far.

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Wow - and I thought I did a lot of trades!

I must admit the ā€œFreeā€ aspect has made me trade far more frequently on FT - I probably did 25 trades in 5 years on my old platform, due to the fees.

Moving forward I expect to reduce the number of different stocks in my portfolio (currently 26) and then trade less frequently but in bigger volumes. But itā€™s really hard not to be tempted to click the ā€œBuyā€ button on the odd punt every now and then :slight_smile:

Any of your trades on US markets?

I made a video on this quite a while back, and couldnā€™t agree more - I did it hypothetically based on how frequent I invest and its good to see how much youā€™ve saved. If you have X amount to invest upfront to leave then of course it wonā€™t apply, but where lots of new investors like myself are drip feeding money, actually, the incumbent brokers are counter intuitive and could cause you to lose more than you gain.

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Only thing that I think is worth considering when making these comparisons is that youā€™ve compared zero fee Freetrade transactions to instant fee based transactions. So itā€™s not like for like.

That said Freetrade still comes out on top, but if your happy with end of day free trades then your not as worried about price or timing the market, so the same thought should maybe be applied elsewhere which would in theory make the other sites cheaper with regular monthly investing prices rather than high fee instant trades.

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Actually as a founding member I have free alpha for life, so all of the trades have been instant :wink:

Yes, about 30% of them were US