It can be tempting to sell your holdings, especially when it only takes a few taps. So, to help you stick to your investing goals, you can now lock your Portfolio until a date you choose so you won’t be able to execute sell orders until then.
You’ll be able to add to your Portfolio as normal, by executing buy orders manually.
But if you try to liquidate from a locked Portfolio, we’ll remind you that you can’t until the date you set.
By adding some extra friction, we hope you’ll find it easier to control your impulses or stick towards your strategy.
If you still want to sell your shares, you can chat to us in the app and we’ll help.
If you just want to try it out for the first time, please pick a short time frame!
Just going to bring this idea back round to see what people think.
The one down side to a smooth selling experience is that emotion can sometimes override one long term plans. Having the ability to freeze a position with a 5 - 30 minute defrost time (set when you freeze) could be a useful feature.
I think some friction can be a good thing, for both buying and selling.
I was pretty annoyed when I started needed pre-approval to trade, but it’s probably forced me to think more carefully because now instead of just opening an app I have to go through the whole compliance process first and I have to be confident I’m willing to buy/sell regardless of the price change until I get approval.
Perhaps an optional setting to add a 1 or 2 working day ‘cooling off period’ between initiating and confirming a trade would be good way to mimick this and help prevent overtrading.
This is a bit of a conflict of interest for FT though, who presumably would rather people trade more often.
I like this idea It reminds me of the lottery app and scratch cards. I clicked to stop having the option as I knew it was too easy to be silly with them and have never phoned to unlock as it is a pain to do but I can if I wanted to.
This idea is simple and for those impulse investors it could be great with an option to get out. My only worry, which is probably not an issue, would be how much resource would it take to manage etc as customer service does seem stretched.
I proposed something similar here long-term-investor-setting but it did not gain any traction. Any help to overcome our biases against long term investing (we cannot stop ourselves meddling) would be welcome by me.
I think your idea didn’t get traction as it mentioned being locked in for 1 year+ and that is quite a big commitment and huge issue if people suddenly need access to their money. In fact everyone commented below that it was a good idea but needed an escape clause in certain reasons.
The risk of the original idea and variants of it are that what may be wisdom today might prove to be folly at some point in the future. You shouldn’t invest money that there is any reasonable chance you will need in the next several years, but a very unlikely combination of events (or, poor judgement on the likelihood of needing the money going in) can change that.
I think a voluntary delay of between 30 minutes and 48 hours might work for the purposes being discussed.
But surely that is covered with the original saying
I think the actual calling is best as it makes you think properly whilst a 30 min cool down might as well not be there as people will just use that and still be in the heat of the moment. It is a huge difference and one that may stop the impulsive person from doing anything they later regret.
It needs to be accessible ASAP but with a big enough barrier to stop the impulse and that would be making contact. Just my view that 30 min cool down wouldn’t actually prevent the gambling type impulse.
Still not sure about the proper use case for this on the Freetrade platform. The great thing with this app is that - even if you sold
/bought for some impulsive or bad reason - you can immediately buy/sell again for no costs.
This feature imho only really makes sense for platforms with trading costs.
Edit: Didn’t take into considerations possible rebuy-tax implications…
It’s about adding friction to protect against one’s emotions during periods of volatility and to give time for people to think over their actions. This would be opt in and would be part of a set of tool to help educate investors into good practices
and in this case Freetrade might be able to step in and help - unlike a certain frozen food shop.
In all seriousness the markets don’t always go up and if you’re at all sure wether your investing is getting out of hand enable this feature. While paused read up on this article on 10+1 investment principles.
No thunder stolen, Neil. You are eagle-eyed as ever.
This will hopefully not be needed for most of our customers but for the few that do feel they might need to put the breaks on, we developed this feature.
a position with a 5 - 30 minute defrost time (set when you freeze) could be a useful feature.
You are eagle-eyed as ever.