The factional shares used to be quite useful toget onto the good shares on the US market
Now I suddenly seem cut off (I used the weekly recurring order to build up over last few months)
With high prices per share on the US market,it seems a bit daunting to get onto buy shares of the order 200$ to 500$plus per unit
Freetrade have quoted HMRC prohibiting this for ISA; I assume all ISA share providers follow this,? Any feedback?
I have Hargreaves which I will check soon and report
I think FT may be the only ones so far but it is a proactive preventitve measure and hopefully will be reversed once the Government are able to set HMRC straight.
They could of at least put a banner on the fractional share screen so people knew they couldnt buy. I was helping someone on their account and neither of us knew about this.
Sad day for FT😩
Just checked my monthly and seems most will now not buy as they were too expensive unless fractional for 10% each of my DD. This really ruins the partial working SIPP recurring order options now.
This just makes pension funds more viable as you are limited on what you can buy.
Edit - Just realised only for ISA so not affecting pension so not as bad for this situation but is for my friend who i found this issue with on her ISA.
there was an email sent out a few weeks ago about this.
but yes it sucks. I now have loose change sitting around doing nothing. Oh well, just have to wait for the divies to pile up and maker larger punts…but the snowball is dead. for now at least…but realistically its over.
I dont read messages as mostly trying to get sign ups etc so my fault. TBH it is making me think the package is not as great an offering as it was.
I already mainly use SIPP but now the ISA is effectively dead to my intended purchases of Berkshire and Apple etc.
This means it is now a very expensive pension only effectively.
Would be good to know it is only 6 months or something but guess it is possibly not going to change if they already stopped it.
I appreciate it is not FT making the choice and dont blame them at all for the HMRC rules.
My point is that without access to stocks I want, the price is extremely pointless to me. I could buy a free option elsewhere and buy funds that cover the kind of stocks i want now.
Also found the lack of message when trying to buy annoying as a user for me and another person who didnt notice email. A small banner or blocking the fractional option would be sensible.
Again, dont blame FT for change but this is a huge change for many and imagine a lot will either leave or be considering it as most top bought stocks are now unaffordable for many.
Hopefully it changes very soon and is a storm in tea cup!
Hi @Big-g thanks for the feedback. I can chat with the team if there’s some sort of notice that we can make more prominent on the screens when buying. The limitation is only for the ISA account, so if you add a pound amount it will have to be at least enough for one whole share. There will be an error stating to add more money if necessary.
In terms of the timeline, we are, I’m afraid, not clear ourselves. We need the ISA Rules to change despite our disagreement with how they are being interpreted.
Of course as soon as there is news, we will let customers know through multiple channels.
I just read @Big-g comment about fractional shares in a ISA made me want to give it a go.
If you choose to buy based on pound amounts it won’t let you buy an amount below 1 share which is fine. And if you enter an amount greater than a whole share value it will go through, like UK whole share purchases.
For whole share based purchases you can enter a number of whole shares even if you don’t have enough money in your account. It then fails at the purchase stage with failed order, this isn’t a good user experience and it should prevent you from submitting the order!
It’s a pity. I think it was great for new investors who wanted to dip a toe in investing in large cap companies without putting large amounts of capital at risk - but obviously not FT’s fault.
One thing I have noticed since the change, is that open market instant orders are getting queued and then not executing more often… but if I just use a limit order, it goes through immediately.
This is a slight pain as I’ve got a few shares where I’ve got less than a share and can’t not buy to be just over a whole share so have to juggle more to get over the whole share and then sell down to the whole share.
