@Freetrade_Admin , @freetrade_user
Hi,
I just bought CRW(craneware) stock when it was £17.99 and the review order displayed the same price of £17.99. However the stock excuted at £18.55 and total loss of £160.
But the screen still shows the share price of £17.99 .
After few mints it went back to £18.50 and sold it - but again the execution price was £18.041 which doesn’t match with the price.
Altogether, total loss of £160…
I was watching this stock past 2 hrs continously!
Loss!!!
FT is not showing you live prices. They are delayed by 15mins. You will need to find another price provider that shows real time prices for when you execute.
I agree that it is very poor in 2020 not to see the tradeable prices. It’s so 1980s
Looks like this trades in very low volumes and consequentially has very large spreads.
Freetrade could offer better visibility of the live bid/ask prices so you could see this in app, but there’s not really anything they can do that would have stopped you losing the spread here (beyond allowing an informed decision)
Other providers charge extra for real time prices I believe?
There’s two different pricing points here I believe. When looking at your holdings then prices 15 minutes out of date are the norm unless you have paid for live pricing.
When trading though it really shouldn’t be acceptable to offer a stale price before buying or selling in this day and age. HL approach is to offer a trading window of 15 seconds or so during which the price does not move.
I had a trade the other day, admittedly on a small cap AIM stock, where the price moved by 9% against me. Wasn’t a lot of money but that swing is relatively huge
I really think Freetrade should show bid and ask prices, it’s one thing making things look simpler. but it seems a lot of new users don’t realise that there is a difference between the price you can buy a stock for and the price you can sell it for at any one time.
Otherwise this will just come up over and over again. I think there’s enough room for it on the buy screen
Looking at that stock it looks like there can be periods of 20 minutes or more between trades. It would be good to have some kind of warning about very low volume stocks and big spreads. Although I think it would be wrong to stop people trying to trade them, It does concern me to see inexperienced investors buying things like this.
I recall from the last AMA that Adam mentioned the cost of live prices from the LSE was £4 per month per user which l think is nuts.
Perhaps a good middle ground would be to show the bid/offer spread when you hit the buy or sell button? I don’t care about the spread when looking at my portfolio until I’m actually going to buy or sell.
Also think that some are getting annoyed because they’re trying to trade stocks which isn’t what Freetrade is about.
£4 (presumably monthly?) would be cheap compared to other platforms - one charges £14.95 pm for services including live Level 1 price. Worthwhile I guess if you are trading a lot
My understanding is that’s cost, surely any provider would put a mark up in it.
If FT increased the plus subscription by £4 and included this I think you’d get more negative comments about the price and it would put people off.
FT want everyone investing, not trading - those who want to trade should go to a platform which is designed for that (and is reflected in the much higher price point).
Hi 
When you place an order, you may receive a different price to the one you saw in-app.
The pricing you see in app is indicative. We display the most recent pricing data available to us from our third party providers. When we execute your order, we go out to market makers to retrieve quotes. We then select the best price possible to fulfil your order. This means you may find the actual price you achieve may be different to the price you saw in the app beforehand.
If you’d like us to check the execution of your order, feel free to drop us a message in-app!
Hi James,
I did dropped the message with the screenshots - as the price wasn’t deferred even after i buy, still i was in loss…as it didn’t give the quoted price either.
I don’t see anything wrong with using Freetrade for trading, however it is not best suited for short term day trades.
I think the problem here is short term trading on an Illiquid stock. The same thing would have happened on any platform. the only difference being that if you knew the bid/ask spread you would know in advance that it was a loser.
Is there a reason that FT doesn’t build in a customer acceptance step (like HL?) as that would avoid this sort of issue. You wouldn’t need live pricing in app but in the order flow there is already an assessment of the offer price done automatically to check that customers are getting a reasonable price, why not just add in a step to the order flow telling the client the offered price and giving 15 secs to approve?
I’m even ready to pay bit more price for live updates…
is it the same case for Plus customers!
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I bought a share at £9.50
only to find i was charged £9.60 plus commission
why the difference?
stamp duty probably a factor
the app never has the correct price, always delayed, personally I always use yahoo finance to check the price before hitting the buy button
Yahoo also doesn’t have a live price, it’s never correct.
Price lags behind the ‘live’ price on every platform by varying amounts. I’ve seen freetrade have a more up to date Nasdaq price than Nasdaq and yahoo, or yahoo having it, or Nasdaq having it.
You can always make improvements but the difference is usually so tiny it doesn’t matter unless your day reading in which case it’s the wrong platform.