Great post there! One thing I did not quite understand:
We’ve ironed out a few bugs in the last couple of days, and are waiting on 4pm today (when the trades execute) to check these have all been resolved — it’s all looking good so far though!
Cmon, could we not get Adam an Alpha account with instant trades? Or donate £1 so that the outcome of that trade could also be shared on the blog? 
Fake news - Rob loves those sunglasses 
We’ve also been testing our basic trades in pre-production this week. These are more complicated than the instant trades because of the delayed execution, as before they execute we need to check the current price and adjust orders to scale down the number of shares if the price has risen.
I knew there was nothing basic in “basic” trades. Bet the test cases the engineering team have to write just keep growing 
How many Carnival shares did your buy? Dividend of 2.5% (quarterly?) is that correct? 
Declares it’s dividend in USD so depends how you want to account for the FX. At current cable rate I calculate an approx. annualised yield of 2.75% (assuming gbpusd @ 1.33, current share price circa 4927 and the $0.4, $0.45, $0.45 and upcoming $0.50). Of course this is a moving target. Quarterly, correct.
As for how many Adam bought - loads. He went big. No, he didn’t. He went small. The dividend payment on June 18th will not change his life.
At current cable rate I calculate an approx. annualised yield of 2.75% (assuming gbpusd @ 1.33, current share price circa 4927 and the $0.4, $0.45, $0.45 and upcoming $0.50).
Actually it might change his life, if it all works smoothly and the app is awesome (which we know it will be) then millionaires all round I think!!
… this time next year Rodney
It’s pretty safe to infer that the app won’t be rolled out externally before this date then given it’s part of testing…?
The timing of the dividend isn’t actually a factor in the timing of the rollout - the key thing for us is we will have a test dividend flowing through our system well before any customer one does.
We picked Carnival because it was the stock paying out a dividend the soonest that we could still buy in time, and it still has a 3 week lead time. Most were a lot longer, so we’re not expecting any customer dividends coming into us any time soon! Which gives us plenty of time to deal with any issues (which we don’t expect) when this one comes in.
Soooo … the app is rolling out before 18th June? 
Can we expect another update on Friday @Rob? Keen to hear about how the rollout to the team and the pen testing are going 
We’ll definitely be giving you regular updates, but can’t guarantee it’ll be every Friday - it all depends on the timing of key milestones, as I want to make sure the updates are interesting and relevant.
As Rob says, we’ll definitely do regular updates from now on.
We should be able to make them weekly very, very soon (with continuous smaller updates) as we are revving up.
With our trade tests ramping up @rob_h has prepared a delightful fantasy voyage through the Freetrade backend.
Did you check the CVs of these “magic elves”? I think you’ll find they are Goblin imposters
They are the only elves we could get on a startup budget.
I feel sorry for the engineers-goblins that are yet to join the Team 
Ouch! Savage editing. Some of my jokes mysteriously vanish. The elves being hyper on caffeine after some soy lattes culled. My ‘open outcry’ caveat removed. Savage. Savage I tell you!
We sift out the silver and just leave the gold
