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.