Update ahead of market open on 1st Feb 2021

Freetrade Chat 🔥
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Hi everyone

We’ve been flat out the last couple of days, so apologies we’ve been a little quiet here on the forum.

Your support on threads like the one below, and many messages elsewhere, mean a lot to us and we’ve been sharing these with our team over the weekend on Slack.

Update ahead of market open on 1st Feb 2021

As @adam shared on Twitter yesterday, our team has been working this weekend to develop a solution to the capacity issues imposed on us by our partners.

We’ve made great progress on this big technical challenge, and wanted to let you know where we’re at.

Our plan is to enable trading on US stocks on a gradual, phased basis from market open, and monitor our platform performance before enabling more stocks.

We may need to temporarily close the market if there are issues.

Orders may be queued due to high demand, and they could be rejected at market-level due to the expected extreme volatility.

Please consider the additional risk involved in trading volatile stocks. Your capital is at risk.

Our US trading partner has informed us that it may need to temporarily halt trades in $AMC due to increased clearing risk. We will update here if/when the situation on this stock changes and if any other stocks are impacted.

To confirm, we aim to make sells available on all stocks, as we did on Friday. Buys will then be enabled on stocks gradually, with volatile stocks like $AMC in later stages of the rollout. We’ll share a list of available stocks when we have it, as we did on Friday.

We’ll share updates on Twitter and on here as soon as we have them.

We are doing everything we can to give you full access to the markets. We are on your side.

When you invest, your capital is at risk.

Thanks again,

Sam

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Thanks, guys. Sending good vibes to all the employees.

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Thanks so much for the effort you’re all putting into this. It’s hugely appreciated.

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Well done all. Great to be able to engineer a solution this way when someone’s only giving you 1/18th of the usual volume.

Hope it all goes as smoothly as it can.

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Why is this unpinned now? @Freetrade_Team

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Thanks Sam, great effort by the team on this

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Great work.

Is there any kind of statement from Barclays on why they did it in the first place? I and my fiancee bank with them and always have, and unless they have a damn good reason for doing it I’ll be going elsewhere this week

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Just expired at 8 AM I think, will re-pin now

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All your hard work is much appreciated. Well done to you all. :+1:

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I appreciate the teams hard work and can see they’ve gone through a huge amount of effort to get this sorted.

I just don’t understand why the FX provider is continuing to implement this practice of limiting trades into this week, while it seems that every other investment platform will allow trading as normal from today. Seems like a shitty move from the FX provider with no valid rationale behind it, and unnecessarily hurting FT’s business.

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Any chance AMC will be available on market open?

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To confirm, we aim to make sells available on all stocks, as we did on Friday. Buys will then be enabled on stocks gradually, with volatile stocks like $AMC in later stages of the rollout. We’ll share a list of available stocks when we have it

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Appreciate the challenges you face here and I think you are doing a great job.

Working slightly outside the box a little - can you not just stop sending all the USD sell orders to currencycloud? So instead of netting them down - just keep the USD balance for buy orders coming in? If there is a serious imbalance and currencycloud can’t accommodate the size of the Fx transaction, I guarantee transferwise can.

I know you will sit on some Fx risk - but hopefully it will be minimal. And if there is a loss, I’m sure it can be taken from the marketing budget (though appreciate this might also be depleted from all the free trade offers and new joiners).

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Thanks. I didnt want to have to spread my AMC buys over multiple accounts but it looks like im going to have to this week.

Hopefully everything will be back to normal by this afternoon?

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We plan to gradually enable US stock buys again. We will go by most-widely held stocks first and GME & AMC will be the last priority, only when we are confident you can actually buy them and don’t be disappointed.

We’re doing our best to get everything back online.

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