I’ve been recently feeling that it is time for me to experiment a bit with stock and shares trading. I am only looking to put in a small amount of money so finding something with low fees and low barriers of entry is crucial. The best option I have found so far was Freetrade’s general investment account. As the amount of money is going to be very low at least for now I shouldn’t need tax shielding from ISA. Are there any other platforms you would reccomend I check out before opening an account with them?
If you’re new you may find investing in funds and ETFs a better option. Take a look at HL, their fees are low and it’s a very reputable platform.
If you start off with funds then you can see the spread of your investment across a number of companies and get a feel how several do at a time rather than riding one companies fortunes.
I thought ETFs are available with Freetrade as well with their basic account? I was planning on putting most of the money into some funds.
I should probably also mention that the bulk of my short term saving go into regular savings accounts and LISA and my pension contributions are in widely diversified ETFs. This would be mostly just play money.
They may well be but it’s quite limited. They don’t have a full range. I’m not a fan of freetrade though so I am biased.
While Freetrade don’t have the number of stocks available that others do yet they are regularly adding to the stock list. They now have over 3,800 available
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Trading 212 is a better option if you want:
A better looking app
More stocks but the gap is narrowing
Far, far quicker Withdrawals
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I’d vouch for Freetrade too. They had no-commission trading unlike HL.
I now run all of my trades through there, including ETF’s (S&P500, FTSE All World, £INRG, FTSE100 etc).
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Another vote for Freetrade.
Trading 212 definitely look interesting. Especially the free ISA and uk fractional shares. I assume Freetrade still only offers fractional shares for US stocks?
I assume you mean actively managed funds? I am still a bit unsure about the correct terminology, I thought ETFs are funds.
If I may what favourite funds do you have?
Go £INRG 
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I think it’s subjective.
Freetrade looks a bit like a kiddies game imo
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It’s a massive headache moving from a GIA to ISA at a later date, so I’d think carefully about an ISA, even if you’re starting small. In which case, Trading212 may be more attractive, as the fixed Freetrade ISA fee will hurt, if you’ve only got a small pot
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@Odvarkad Having both I can say Freetrade is fine if you don’t care about having a lot of choice, or having wavey charts, or paying £3/£10 just to put in limit and stop orders.
T212 has close to 10,000 instruments, no fee for ISA, decent charts, you have a clear idea of spread too so the buy and sell price is shown.
If you are wanting a quick way to deposit monthly and for it to auto buy then it has pies too.
Don’t be swayed by the fancy pink interface of FreeTrade. Although T212 might look boring in comparison it’s light years ahead in the tools it gives you.
Free share referral:
Edit: PM me instead if you the link 
Edit: for transparency that referral 
gives both you and me a free share each that’s worth anything from 1 to a 100 pound.
As mentioned always pick ISA and fill that up first with £20k before thinking of using Invest. The only time to use Invest is for non-ISA eligible stocks if you really want them.
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I would definitely enjoy being able to have ISA for free. I’ve been looking at how T212 makes money as there are no fees or commisions and it says they make profit through spread but couldnt really find how it is calculated and how big of an impact it makes. Is it something to worry about or does it tend to be fairly low with low inpact on the total cost?
The T212 spreads in the ISA (and Invest) are raw, so there’s no markup or widening at all. So the ASK (buy) and BID (sell) are exactly what they are.
It doesn’t charge either on buying foreign currency so again it’s the raw GBP into say USD or EUR. When you buy foreign stocks it actually helps show what the gain/loss is from the stock and what the FX impact is (so if the pound has gained or weakened against it).
T212 is profitable by transparent sharing lending in Invest side and via the CFD platform fees. The CFD does widen the spread, charges 0.5 FX and you pay swap fees for holding overnight. It’s used for day trading and allows you to take a short position (you think the stock will go down). I would actually recommend another platform called CMC instead if you ever try it. But I would strongly recommend using the practice mode and nuking that a few times when playing with leverage. If you are new to investing it’s not worth looking at CFD when you start out. Stick to going long in ISA/Invest with your own funds, and avoid going short until you really get to grips with it.
T212 made a post just the other day that the Invest/ISA side is profitable which is ace.
If or anyone wants to say hi I’m here on the forum. I’m not staff or connected with T212 just an enthusiastic customer who likes investing and hopefully getting very rich in the process!
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I use Vanguard Investor.
Unlike Free trade/Trading212 the ISA is flexible. Meaning one can withdraw and put money back in without burning the allowance.
The fee is small percentage across any of their accounts - general, ISA, junior ISA, SIPP. No other fees for buying/selling/transfering/etc.
The range of funds is limited but as a starter they have nice ESG funds that excluded Gas,OIL,Nuclear,VICEs, risk appetite funds, and just global trackers. One cannot go wrong with just VWRL.
Their pension service does fully electronic paper work pension transfers which are nice. And they do manage to do ISA transfers very quickly for me.
There is direct debit option for fees. And one can do regular investing via direct debit at any date of your choosing. Sales and withdrawals are via BACS.
Buying up VWRL might be easiest thing to do then picking random stocks by hand.
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Typically ‘fund’, without any other qualifier, is used to refer to a non-exchange traded fund, which is usually an actively managed basket of stocks. The price you pay is the most recently calculated value of the components, typically calculated once per day.
An ETF is an exchange-traded-fund. Also a basket of stocks. Since they are traded on the stock market, the price you pay can fluctuate in strange ways, but you’d expect it to be inline with the value of their components.
N26throwaway listed a bunch of investment trusts I think, which are something different again. They’re also exchange traded.
The main disadvantage of the free platforms Freetrade and T212 (the latter being more free than the former) is that they only deal in exchange traded products.
Which means you miss out on all the big funds that that I believe the majority of retail investors invest in on the “traditional” platforms.
I use iWeb since there’s no holding fee and the £5 trades don’t matter when I only do around 4 trades per year. The platform that’s right for you depends on the size, quantity and type of your trades. Compare brokers here.
All that said, before doing anything I’d strongly recommend following this flowchard and reading through everything here as a basic starting point.
Just keep in mind this truism in investing. There are only 3 possibilities:
- You pick stocks and happen to get lucky for some limited period of time
- You pick stocks and get unlucky
- You follow the market and gain or lose whatever the market as a whole does
Please note there is no 4th possibility (for you as a retail investor) along the lines of “you get better at picking stocks and consistently outperform the market for long periods of time”. “Skill” is not something 99.999% of investors (even professionals) have. I say this since you say your motivator is to “experiment a bit”. The results you get with your early experimentation will tell you nothing about how well you’ll do in the future. Once you understand the dynamics of the stock market, your motivation should simply be to “make gains”, and the probability of you succeeding at that in the amount you desire depends on your appetite for risk.
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That is sage advice and the flow chart does help point out the pay off debts, build a small emergency fund, workplace pension etc and only play with money you can afford to potentially lose with stocks.
I think the OP was however wanting to compare stocks platforms based on the Freetrade or something else question.
You also can have as many platforms as needed, just like you have as many banks or saving providers that give you the tools you need.
Specifically for S&S ISA then T212 is currently the favourite. But there’s other platforms for other types of investments.
As always the don’t put all eggs in one basket motto applies.
Yeah it’s always worth doing an instant bank transfer, rather than using a debit/credit card. I don’t have any issue in them passing that cost on.
Freetrade as a comparison just stops you at £1000. So £2000 and then passing on the cost seems fine to me.
Just updated my post above if anyone wants the referral it’s now a case of PM me 
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