What are Freetrade working on just now

Does anyone know what Freetrade are working on at the moment in terms of features to roll out to us and also how the European expansion is going?

A few bits were in our January company update …

There’s lots of exciting work in progress, including:

  • Direct Debit :zap:You’ll be able to set up a Direct Debit to your Freetrade account, making it even easier to invest regularly.
  • Recurring orders :robot: Following the beta last year, we’re continuing to work on the highly-requested and revamped recurring orders feature (see image below). Watch this space.
  • More stocks :calling: We’ll continue to add more stocks and other instrument types.

Sneak peek of recurring orders, work in progress and subject to change

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Thanks Alex.

Will the recurring orders happen on a fixed day or a day of the investor’s choosing (each month)?

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This is an exciting feature, I can hardly wait to set and forget my portfolio.

Will this work with UK stocks too, eg just buying as many shares as it can rather than fractional? :crossed_fingers:

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Glad to see you’re as excited for recurring orders as we are, and thanks for the questions!

@weenie; you’ll have the option of setting an initial investment date, and then a recurring weekly / fortnightly / monthly schedule thereafter. This can be paused or edited at any time for absolute flexibility :raised_hands:

@rehpot; yes, you will be able to combine both fractional US instruments with whole-share UK instruments in a single recurring order schedule. :white_check_mark: As you suggest, we will attempt to buy as many whole shares as possible with your allocated £ amount on the scheduled execution date, with a ‘whole-share’ tag and indicative number of shares added to the order setup UI to show this difference in behaviour.

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Legend, thanks for the update @Damon. This feature will be a game-changer!

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This needs adding asap looks great

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I like the look of this, so it’ll be good to see. I use the current version but only in a limited way.

I know some people want fractional UK shares but honestly, I don’t care. Brokers have always been able to fufil recurring orders by buying x amount or as many as possible.

Do you know if this version will have options to keep track of unspent deposits for the next recurring order?

Also sort of related. Do you know if this work can be translated in anyway to managing automatic dividend reinvesting? Anything like this ok the horizon?

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Thanks for the reply(ies), Damon.

In the event of a recurring order failing to execute (due to change in share price/liquidity), what will happen? Will it try to resubmit automatically?

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Thanks @eden! To answer your questions:

Do you know if this version will have options to keep track of unspent deposits for the next recurring order?

This version of recurring orders will make purchases according to your committed investment amount. If I understand your question correctly, this means the order won’t automatically invest any remaining cash over and above your commitment, but we are exploring alternative options such as ‘invest all available’ for future iterations of the feature.

Do you know if this work can be translated in anyway to managing automatic dividend reinvesting?

Similarly, yes - I do see synergies with recurring orders and dividend reinvesting. Whilst cash dividend payments, if left in your account, would be eligible for investment with recurring orders on your next scheduled date, I expect we’ll assess a more formalised DRIP option in future.

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Hi @weenie,

In the event of a recurring order failing to execute (due to change in share price/liquidity), what will happen? Will it try to resubmit automatically?

Each component of the recurring order will be submitted individually so, in the event of a failure, the cash allocated to the failed component will be returned to you. There won’t be any automatic re-submission of the failed component order(s) in this version, but you can choose to either execute the trade manually, or wait until the next scheduled investment date.

As above, I expect this to be something that we refine and improve on in future iterations.

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What difficulties are you facing as recurring ordering have been in beta for so long when can we see this coming live to everyone we are almost 4 months in to the year with no new feature

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Tbh 10 out of 10 for communication today. It gives alot more positive energy in the forum. Needs to be more ofter

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You understand correctly. Thats good to hear. I prefer the iterative approach with freetrade where it makes sense as obviously it means you can get things out a little faster.

and yes, an ‘invest all available’ option is a good idea.

this would be great. I have the expectation that eventually freetrade will roll out a feature similar to HL and ii that track dividend payments and segregate them by company for automatic re-investment. both the above brokers do this. Obviously this is more complex, requires tracking each companies dividend payments, segregating them from normal available cash etc. However I think this is an ideal end goal for dividend reinvestment

Glad to see these things coming to fruition

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Is this option only for recurring orders? If so that is really poor. Many people like to add ad-hoc and being able to just add and let it then split would be really good. Would be great to know as this is the main thing I have been waiting for but if it won’t be unless you set up recurring I will need to find another option.

Hi @Big-g,

The primary goal for this version of recurring orders is to better-enable healthy, regular investing. This may not yet accommodate all auto-investment use cases - such as ‘invest all cash’, or fluctuating ad hoc contributions - but demand for these use cases will steer the direction of future iterations, and your feedback is noted, thanks.

It’s not perfect for your use case, but this version would allow you to setup a recurring order for the following day with your intended distribution and any ad hoc cash contributions you currently have in the account. This recurring order could then be paused post execution, and amended to another cash amount for reactivation once you’ve got cash to invest again.

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Interesting development…

This looks like the user defines a fixed % allocation to be used for each recurring order.

What I would really like is to define the desired % allocation at portfolio level and for the % allocation of each recurring order to auto-adjust to rebalance the portfolio toward the desired portfolio-level allocation (auto-rebalancing via new contributions). Hope this is being considered as a future feature.

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Hi @Damon

How will it work if you have a mix of fractional US shares and non-fractional UK shares? If everything is fractional you can perfectly follow your allocation wishes. However, when the UK shares come into place will you allocate based on the closest integer of UK shares?

For example, I want to buy 5% of UK company A. This 5% corresponds to 5.4 fractional shares. Would the app automatically trigger an order for 5 full shares? And the remaining 0.4 is deposited in cash?

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OK thanks for that, appreciated, but really disappointing seeing as the other ideas/threads/suggestions kept getting merged into the recurring orders one, when in fact they will not be the same thing. I kept saying they were different and shouldn’t be merged as people specifically were asking for Pies or something else. Now they all got merged but the roll out is not what the people wanted.

TBH this is one step too far in half rolled out options for me and will have to find another provider that will do this. I have been waiting for this one thing for so long and lost count of the times I mentioned if it would be a pie/drip and all kept getting merged into the same idea. Now it will not be the same. :rofl:

All I want to do is add X amount and get it split in a pie, simples. I don’t want to have to do work arounds to simply add funds this way. Understand it is not a priority, fair enough, but the implication it was coming is not actually accurate.

Anyhow good luck FT, maybe I will get a small % back of my investment, but having realised virtually all the people most liked by me and vice versa have now left or gone silent I feel now is a good time for me to as well.

I have gone from being one of the loudest fan boys to being quite negative and that is not my nature so will delete my profile when I can find the setting. Genuinely wish all good luck and hope FT succeed in everything it wants but apart from SIPP, which still has no plans/options/discussions on future drawdowns etc, the app is not doing the easy options for my needs.

FT is still a great app and the best option for many/most but price was never my main concern and was more that I liked FT and wanted to be part of it growing and what I believed from the forums will happen has not so don’t want to wait any longer.

Good luck all!

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I have waited so long for this,I really can’t wait much longer. It looks amazing and finally a product that is on par with 212 offfering.
I just want to invest a cpl hundred a months paid by Standing Order or Direct Debit on a % of shares and forget about it. When will this feature be available @Damon

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