No way to tell. Could be right away, could be in a few months. All depends on when Freetrade start the process to extract the funding. In the past, it’s been within 1/2 weeks though.
1 Like
In my experience it is about 15 days after they close the round. Which for FreeTrade is tonight.
EDIT: I just checked for the three non-Monzo CrowdCube investments I have made so far, and it took, from the day they closed the round until the day they charged my credit card: 12, 16 and 22 days.
Hey all, just a reminder that if you’ve got a referral code to head to our Referral Wiki and posting it there.
Posting to say “DM me for a code” is just as spammy, I’m afraid! I’ve removed a whole bunch of these above.
Thanks
14 Likes
I’ve just made my first ever YouTube video, documenting my investments in Freetrade.
If anyone is interested please check it out here:
I’m new to investing and making videos so please be gentle haha.
Considering making more fintech videos in the future too 
5 Likes
So far I’m not doing very well with my investments
If a Director is buying shares could it be that there is scheme wherby the shares are matched with a free share or some such other employee benefit?
Got my free share last night through referral. A lovely Morrisons one worth a whopping £1.83 
1 Like
If you started in the last 2-3 weeks, you can blame the rumours of a China/ US trade war - dropped the FTSE, S&P and Dow Jones circa 3.5% - looks to have stabilised now so should hopefully crawl back up.
1 Like
My freeshare was BP
3 Likes
Between Brexit and Trump/China trade war, this seems to be a challenging time to be investing.
My own investments are almost all down to some degree or other - except for EFTs, and even those have suffered in the past few days (see: Trump/China).
With my last deposit, I rebalanced my portfolio to compensate, purchasing bonds instead. Lower growth but should be more stable. Time will tell. Hopefully, whatever happens, 20 years from now I’ll be laughing.
This is sort of the opposite of what’s desirable. When the stock market is down, you want to buy more equity, since it’s cheap. When the market is up, you might want to sell to make a profit. Buy low, sell high.
The common and effective way of doing this is to keep a % of non-equity (eg. bonds), and rebalance each year. So if you decide on 20%, then if the stock market is down on your rebalance day, you will find that your bonds are now a higher percentage of your portfolio. So you sell bonds to buy shares until you’re at 20% again. If the market is up on rebalance day, you will find that your bonds are now under 20% of your portfolio, so you sell shares to buy bonds, to make it 20% again.
These days, with interest rates below the level of inflation, bonds are not actually a good choice. Better to keep cash in a good savings account. But exactly the same rebalancing can be done as with bonds.
1 Like
I disagree, bonds after the first year(I use NSI) are actually a very safe savings in my opinion as the rate of interest is not going to go up any time soon so you are not losing money. Further to this I have an IFISA with Wisealpha and their corporate note system currently has a return on “safe” bonds at 6%
It took it that HoldenCarver actually meant UK Gilts (or any other government bonds), not NSI premium bonds which are very different things and don’t normally feature as significant parts of investment portfolios.
Wisealpha bonds are not “safe”; you are loaning money to potentially failing companies.
The bonds portion of a portfolio is usually there to provide stability and safety, and should be the safest part of your portfolio: backed by the government is how most people feel safe.
In terms of buying UK gilts and products that perform like them, no one knows if and when interest rates will go up, but you will almost certainly lose money on longer duration gilts. Short duration ones will lose you money due to inflation, guaranteed, and at a faster rate than cash savings.
Hence preferring cash over bonds.
2 Likes
I should clarify I mean senior secure corporate bonds rather than junior bonds.
Sure, you’re first in line to get some of your money back if the business fails. That doesn’t make them “safe”.
Using their automated tool to diversify across all their senior secure notes will help reduce risk, but not to the level of UK gilts or a globally diversified equity investment.
(The Wisealpha notes will still not be diversified over that many companies giving you concentration risk, cover UK businesses only (or mainly?), and has a platform risk: you do not actually buy bonds from the companies, but notes from Wisealpha, which is critically different.)
As you said in your statement, like in any market, its difficult to predict changes in long term interest rates - those rates are “set” by the market rather than by Central Banks who typically set short term rates.
In that vein, your prediction that you’ll lose money in long term gov’t bonds is on pretty shaky ground. The US 10 year bond has made more money this year than the S&P 500 and longer term bonds in general have done well over the past 5 years: iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF ETF | US4642874402
Clearly, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong on future returns and low yields do indicate that bonds are expensive based on historic averages. That said, expensive markets can get even more expensive and you’ll need a decent period of sustained inflation and/or economic growth to see long term interest rates (in the US) get above 3.5% again.
I personally can’t see that happening any time soon.
Thanks, yes, I probably am on shaky ground making a prediction. But I certainly think it’s riskier to go long, even if they happen to be doing well right now.
Not sure what you mean by that. I see the YTD value there as 14.32%, while it is 20.67% for VUSA. 1 year performance is also not much to go on; the multi-year annualised figures are much worse for the bonds.
(Though it’s not clear to me if gains due to the falling £ apply to both of those figures or not, or if there’s something else I’m missing.)
Hello, I have tried to post my Freetrade referral link in the Referral Wiki, however, the site is not allowing me to edit that post as instructed. I do have a code available so will be happy to share.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
1 Like
I had the same issue. Tried to add my link and it wouldn’t save the edits. I have a referral link too if anyone’s interested, each one can only be used once. 
@RL96 @katewilliams
Try again, too many people had @ themselves 