Will there ever be a single platform offering every stock globally?

Investing and Markets 📈
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From East African listed fintechs to Gulf listed banks, Indonesian listed airlines to Chinese listed cleantech, could there ever be a truly comprehensive stock platform for retail investors? Would it be too hard and costly to deliver such a product in reality? It would be hugely complex, but then so was putting a man on the moon :stuck_out_tongue: I’m sure there would be plenty of VC and private equity money around to throw at such an ambition if someone had a credible plan for a solution (assuming there was demand for such a product in the first place). Of course those of us who have invested in Freetrade would love Freetrade to own this space :wink:

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I assume that’s the dream. But we need to design the spaceship before we can think about landing on a moon. :wink:

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There will be, it’s called Freetrade. :wink:

Exactly.

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That’s plan. :slight_smile: Thank you! :pray:

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I think it would be neat to add all stocks within search. And if not available show it greyed out or with a comment that states “Coming soon” or “lack of liquidity” or whatever… the ability for users to then vote for a stock within the app would be way better than on the forum. All users could see it and you’d know they’d want it as they’ve searched for it not just stumbled across it.

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Agree. :+1:

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It might not look great to new users if 90% of stocks are greyed out though. I would guess freetrade has around 10% of all available stocks listed worldwide.

Probably most people in the forum here would understand it, but people I’ve invited who are new to investing would probably say wow this doesn’t have anything available.

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@AchillesFirstStand Only a single digit per cent of the search queries end up as ‘not found’.

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World Federation of Exchanges estimated there were 45,740 listed companies globally, so…

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Fair enough, as long as the discover list doesn’t have 40k stocks and only a few hundred are available.

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Hi @Viktor, I have seen before that you are adamantly against the addition of options because you don’t want to allow them to be used for speculative reasons by amateur investors, but would you consider adding such a feature behind a self-certification test for sophisticated investors?

Essentially options would allow someone who knows what he’s doing to be able to deploy strategies that are impossible in the current version of the app, directly from your app (insurance, improved gains, etc). The prerequired test also discards most of the users who could be damaged by such a feature (and you immediately know that if a user whines about losing everything trading options it’s his fault, as he is a self-certified sophisticated investor).

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I think options could be reasonably safe if you add some limits to what is possible. for example only allow selling call options if the user owns the stock, so they don’t end up bankrupted trying to cover it (no naked calls basically)

Of course you could still lose a lot that way, but you couldn’t lose everything and still end up owing more

Used sensibly selling covered calls can be a way of getting regular income from a stock even if it doesn’t pay dividends. If it goes against you you are just obligated to sell your stock at the strike price, which you knew at the time of selling the call