Hi folks - the current exchange rate is quite prohibitive if we are a regular trader or planning to invest a substantially amount of money at once. It would also be nice to have a better breakdown of the fees we are paying.
Are there any plans to improve this?
Thanks,
Pedro
Freetrade charge 0.45% on forex.
I believe they should make this clearer on the purchase screen when buying US stocks. Have the fee as a separate line item.
Maybe they could improve their offering by working with Transferwise (like Monzo do) - How to make international payments with Monzo: A guide (2022) - Wise, formerly TransferWise
^^^^ this. Totally agree. But they say it isn’t a ‘fee’ but to all intents and purposes it is.
Vote here:
It’s a constant 0.45% which FT doesn’t actually receive as revenue, it goes to a third party. Still, it’s pretty competitive with other brokers charging 2-3 times this amount, or eToro charging a spread of around 1.5%
Someone mentioned this might reduce in future once the new investment platform is up and running to around Transferwise levels, which would be good…
I just compared it against Transferwise’s Monzo integration price, and Freetrade is cheaper up to £800. Which is better than I expected.
Whilst the fees are transparent, I agree they could be a bit clearer.
It would also be nice to know FT’s plans for the future in forex are…
Compared with Degiro, Freetrade is about 350% more expensive in this regard.
Also, I think I’m right in saying Trading 212, another close competitor, charges zilch for currency conversion on stocks.
That said, I imagine it more or less evens out when you take commissions, spread and so on into account but it’s still a fair ol’ whack.
I don’t invest in individual US stocks, so I’m shocked to hear that that’s not already the case.
I think the fee itself is completely reasonable and not excessive. I just think the clarity of it needs improving
I think the fee is not reasonable for active traders. If FT really doesn’t get commission from this an easy way to fix this would be to have different wallets for each currency, this way you only pay the conversion fee when you move between wallets, rather than losing over 1% per investment if you invest in foreign markets. I was using degiro and will move back because of this once I exit my positions.
You can vote for multi-currency accounts…
if/when this is implemented it will save active traders the 0.9% per trade 
From ARK Invest’s fintech analyst:
If it’s a third party issue, they should change the third party - every US stock trade is painful otherwise. Rev not charging it. Stake charges once to move money into $ account/ once to get out. They don’t have UK shares and ISA accounts though.
[Update:]
Obviously this is my fault for not reading things properly, but I only actually found out about the forex fee well after buying a bunch of US shares. 
I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable, but having it itemised on the order recipt would definitely make things clearer
Adam hinted the FX fee would lower to somewhere around transferwise levels once the new platform was up and running and they bring the process in house
The most recent blog mentioned the removal of commission for instant trades was the first of the benefits of the new platform, I imagine there’s a few more announcements coming including fractional shares and maybe a first look at the Alpha account
any update on the FX fee saga? trading 212 just charge .015
0.15
I’ve been thinking about this today.
If I invested $250 on Freetrade I’d be charged 0.45% to convert - about 82p if calculated in pounds.
I can convert that amount on Revolut for free in the week. The commission (if outside your limit) is £1 or 0.25% which ever is higher. In this case 62p but would go up to £1. Despite being charged a commission it’d cost me as the consumer about 18p more.
Obviously if it’s within a commission free limit it will be cheaper on the whole with no fx fee…
Previously I saw this as ‘Free’ vs quite restricted - but for US stocks there’s not much in it for larger orders?
