What's up you guys, sasha here, free trade has recently been disrupting the uk investing market along with trading to one two. These companies are offering something massively massively different to all the big existing old investing companies. You don't need to have a minimum of five or ten thousand pounds to get started. You don't need to pay twelve pounds per trade.

You don't need to have at least three thousand two hundred dollars or, however much it is to go and buy into amazon. All of these things i'm going to get to into a lot of detail in just a second, but first, let's get started with the basics. Free trade offers two different types of accounts. As it stands, they offer a basic general investing account and an isa account.

The basic general investing account is completely free to go and set up and use. There's no fees other than some things i'm going to mention in just a second. The isa account costs three pounds a month. They also have another account type that is coming down.

The line called a sip account. This is a different type of pension, where you can go and invest in the same stocks and shares and etfs and all kinds of other things like that through a pension, i'm gon na make some separate videos that explain how that whole process works over the coming Weeks so make sure you look out for that, but let's talk about the investment and isa accounts for the rest of this video free trade also offered the free trade plus account this one costs 9.99 a month, which is quite a lot you're paying 120 pounds a Year and in exchange you get four real benefits. The first benefit is that you get access to more stocks, there's a lot of different small cap stocks that are not available with the normal account, but if you're paying the 9.99 extra, you can go and buy them as well. The plus account also enables limit orders and stop losses, and this is really important in pretty much any type of investing account.

So the fact that you have to pay to access it is not ideal, because you'd really want to have that. If you have positions on stocks that are more volatile and more prone to potentially having big swings, in addition, if you do pay for the plus account, you don't have to pay the three pounds extra to access a nice account that bit comes for free and the Last perk is you get to have three percent interest paid on any cash sitting in your account which they have been promoting a lot, but i don't really see the point, because this is an investing account. First and foremost, this isn't some kind of savings account and if you put money into it, presumably your intention is to invest it in whatever stocks etfs shares things that you want to have your money invested in. You probably don't want to be sitting around on that cash, because why would you open an investing account to do that and for the short periods, when you might have that cash sitting there, let's say: there's a stock market crash or you pulled out of something but You're not ready to reinvest that three percent is not really going to yield, particularly noticeable results.

I would say the plus account is probably not necessary for the vast majority of people, because the benefits just aren't worth it. If you want to have an iso account, you can get it for just three pounds a month, and most people will be investing in stocks and companies that are available with the normal general investment account without having to access those much smaller stocks. That, perhaps, are much less known; most people probably won't ever get there, even if they pay for the plus account. One point that differentiates free trade from some of their competition is the fact that they do not categorically in any shape or form of a cfds.

Cfds are a higher risk type of investment where you can use leverage. Essentially, you can borrow money to invest and it is far easier to lose your money. The companies that offer these have to legally inform you that you have a high chance of losing it. That's how bad it is, and companies are trading to want to actually make most of their money from the cfd side, because there's fees and things there that don't exist in the normal investing accounts and etoro gone even further, where the regular investing account and the cfd Side are so integrated that you can by accident, go and trade cfds if you just click the wrong thing, but anyway, i always tell people that, if they're new to investing, if they're not quite sure what they're doing, if they're, not experts and professionals, it is a Bad idea to go down the cfd side, and so with free trade.

That option just doesn't exist, so everything is good. Let's quickly talk about fees and on the fees, it is a really simple product. There are no fees at all other than one particular type of fee that i'm going to get to in a second. There are management fees, there are no transaction fees, there are no deposit or withdrawal fees.

The one fee you will have to pay is the 0.45 percent load that they add onto the foreign exchange fee and this one's quite important. It might not seem it, but it is quite important whenever you go and buy stocks that are priced in a currency that isn't pounds. If your account is in pounds, then you will have to pay that forex fee every time you go and do a trade in that other currency, and that means that if you go and buy a stock you're immediately effectively not 0.45 down on the real value of That stock, because you've had to spend that on the fee in order to buy it and when you then sell it in order to cash it in you're, going to lose another 0.45. And although there are fluctuations and things like that, it does mean that net.

You are losing 0.9 on any trade when you buy into some particular stock and then sell it at some point further down the line. It is important to note that, even if you pay for the plus account this fee still stands, you're still going to have to pay it on every single trade. If you're buying things in a different currency to the one in which your account is in, and that means that if you're, investing in etfs in the us and stocks in the u.s like i am you're gon na - have to be paying this fee every single time. But that is the only thing you're going to have to pay.

There are no other charges, so, although on this one they are slightly more expensive and not as free as trading 21.2, they are still infinitely cheaper than pretty much any other option available in the uk, and even better than that, you can also go and get a Free share just like with trading 202 free trade now do free shares and if you go and open an account by following my link in the description below, you will get a free share or a free, etf or a free something else worth up to 200 pounds Which is pretty phenomenal, because if you already have an account with trading 212, you can still go and open an additional one for free as long as it's not the iso account with free trade and go and get another free share. In addition to the one that you've already got not a bad way to get your investing portfolio off the ground now, let me cover some important account features. First, off free trade is a mobile only platform. You can only access it on your phone via the app you can't go and access it by the desktop which you can with trading 212 and with many other providers as well.

And i think that's a massive downside because, although for regular casual, just trying things out and just being able to on the move, sell and buy things as you like, i do use the app and i use the app on trading 202 as well. If you are wanting to do a bit more investing and you're wanting to really dive deep into the shares - and you want to do research alongside trading - which i'm going to get to in a second as to why you might want to do that, then having the Desktop version would be really really helpful. Now the application process is really easy and really fast. I have a whole video where i literally go through the entire process on screen.

If you're interested i'm going to link that in the description below and once you have set up your account, which is normally really quite straightforward, then you have access to this app and overall, the app is really nice and clean. The look is really minimalist. The colors are really nice and bright. There isn't much dead shouldn't be there.

I really really like it. I think it's a really good design. Having said that, the minimalist clean design also means that there are a bunch of things that are missing. That really should be there.

So let's say i want to go, and trade amd amd is one of the companies that i'm invested in that i have a lot of interest in so i go and look at whether i should go and buy it and the only bit of information that the App provides is this graph at the top yeah you can scroll around. You can see what the values are and you can select time frames from one day to one year to the max available. But that's it. You can't access income statements.

You can't access any in-depth pnls. You can't access the balance sheet, there's no historical data neither by year, not by quarter, not by anything. That is the only bit of information you have about the company. Even if you scroll down, there's absolutely nothing.

You can look at the custom charges which basically tell you the trading is free, which is nice, but the only bit information about the company is literally two lines of text it. One of them is the name of the company and the other. One just tells you that they are a tech manufacturer and that's not much to go on. That means that if you're going to be doing any kind of investment, 100 of your research of your looking at numbers and data has to happen outside the app or you're going to be basically trading blind.

And i think, although you probably should do a lot of your research investments outside of the trading app being able to confirm the numbers being able to just quickly check something being able to go and look at stuff before you go and push. The button is important and for an investment app to have none of that, i think, is really really major and one of free trades biggest downsides on the plus side. Free trade offer fractional shares. Surprisingly, even though we're in 2021, this is still a brand new thing, and very few companies offer it all.

The big ones, certainly don't, and the benefit here is that you're able to go and invest in companies where the stock prices are really high for a fraction of the money you would with the old-school providers. Let's say you're wanting to buy a stock in google or an amazon or in something else that is worth potentially thousands of dollars in some cases, if you're doing that trade with hungary's landsdan or with aj bell with any of those big institutional investor type companies, you're Gon na have to spend thousands of dollars just to buy one share as a minimum. The minimum amount that you can trade on free traders two pounds, but that means that you can go and spend two pounds or ten pounds or fifty pounds or, however much you want on investing into amazon, you don't need the full three thousand dollars. That's really neat! The one downside of their fractional shares is they're, not quite as good as trading two and two and the reason they're not is they don't have as many decimal points? So that means let's say you want to go and invest eight pound fifty into amazon, for example.

What they'll do is they'll figure out what is the nearest amount under a pound 50 that buys the right number of available decimal points, if that makes any sense, and so they'll do something like they'll buy you 8 pound 46 worth of amazon, but then you'll have Those 4p left, it always runs down. You have that 4p left that you can't do anything with. You can't invest it because it's less than two pounds and although it's not a big deal and it'll even itself out in the long run, because the next time you do a trade, you can add that 4p to that trade, it's just a little bit annoying and I wish they thought about that element and just added one or two extra decimal points so that you could always trade down to the penny in every single available stock last. I mentioned it very briefly at the beginning of the review, but if you want to go and open an isa account so that you don't have to pay tax on your investments so that all capital gains and dividend yields - and things like that are completely tax-free.

In the uk you have to go and pay the three pound a month fee unless you pay the 9.99 a month for the plus account, and then the iso account comes free. Now let me come to the quirks of this product. I'm going to mention a few things that i really like and a few things that i quite dislike about the app, and these are things that i haven't heard. Other people mention, so i thought it's really important now, because i've actually used the app quite extensively.

Unlike some of the reviewers that i've watched before doing this video - and i wanted to point out a few things that i think are important number one - the fractional shares don't actually apply to everything and what i mean everything i don't mean some obscure random stocks. Some really big things that you might want to invest in don't actually have fractional shares enabled, as i am filming this - and this took me by surprise when i first started, but then i kind of got used to it and began checking before i make my trades. So, for example, vusa is one of the most popular s, p, 500 etf, that you can buy into and on trading two on two you can buy any fractional amount of it that you want, but on trading on free trade, you have to buy round numbers of Shares so if i want to buy this particular etf and go and type in 10 pounds, i can't actually buy it. The review order is blank.

I have to have at least the correct amount of money to buy just one share and the frustrations with the way that this whole thing works don't end there. Let me show you a few other examples. If i want to go and say, buy some amazon, i can do it, but i have to tell them how much i want to buy in pounds. I can't go and select the number of shares i want to buy.

I have to do it in pounds. I go and buy it and the order then goes through, but let's say i then want to sell. If i just bought 10 pounds, i can't then go and sell 10 pounds. I have to tell them how many shares i want to sell and with fractional shares.

It's not very obvious, you have to do some maths in your head, you can have to say well, i'm not sure what the value of this stuff is. If you want to see the value, you then have to go back and understand. Okay, i have 49 pounds of this. Then i go to click sell and like okay.

If i want to have 25 pounds worth, i need to do roughly half so point: zero, one, zero! Seven! Maybe that's going to be about right! This is a big problem with training two one: two you can select either you can either type the number of shares and it automatically tells you how much that's going to be in pounds or you can type in the number of pounds and it'll. Tell you how much is going to be in shares here. You can't do either of those things on the buy side. You have to do it in pounds, but on the sell side you have to do it in shares next related to this.

If i want to buy or sell stocks outside of business hours, it is 1 p.m. In the uk, as i am filming this and let's say i want to go and buy some amd, the order will only be fulfilled at 3 p.m. The next business session that happens, so, if i'm doing this say last night, it will be 3 p.m today and the same goes, irrespective of which particular stocks you're buying or how much buying or anything like that, if you're trading during business hours, that will go through Straight away, so if i go and log in at 2, 30 pm uk time when the u.s market is open, i can go and trade amd there and then, but if i do it now, it'll only execute at some point after 3 p.m. I'm not a big fan of this.

I feel that the execution should happen either immediately or at the next available point in time. I feel like the fact that there's a very weirdly precisely set time is something that is related to how these things used to be done. When you always have your shares executed at the end of the business day, whenever you buy buying or selling them at the end of the next business day, i feel this is somewhat unnecessary, given that the technology is there to not have to do it. So i don't like that feature much either.

Another feature that i'm not a big fan of is this inside tab. So if i hit inside, i get this little screen. The bottom bit of the screen doesn't do anything other than just show me a graph which tells me that i have a bunch of money invested in stocks, and i have a bit of money in cash because i just sold something to test a few things out. It doesn't it's not clickable, it doesn't do anything and if i click on the portfolio performance, it then allows me to see what my performance has been over the last month over the last week or over the lifetime of my account.

But again it doesn't really do very much. It kind of explains to me what these are gives me a little graph, which is neat, but i feel like this. Entire tab is kind of meaningless as it stands, they could have just done it. If i go back to my portfolio and i scroll up to the top, if they made that 351 pound bit clickable, if i could click on that all the portfolio all the whole thing, it doesn't matter and then go to that screen, which shows me the performance That would make far more sense because that's what it relates to, but having a whole separate tab which doesn't really do anything, i think, is a bit pointless.

Having said that, let me talk to you about the discover. The discover is really nice on this app. It is really really interesting. You can still search for whichever etfs or stocks or whatever you want up at the top and they'll come up.

They have stocks and various cts and things that they recently added. They have ipos. They have grouped by the sort of computing tech, and everyone else does that kind of stuff as well. They tell you hey here is the tech stocks.

Here is the large cap stocks here is the finance stocks, but these guys go a little bit deeper. Look. You can go and invest in cloud computing. You can invest in companies with female ceos.

You can invest in companies that do green energy. You can invest in medical companies that focus on cancer treatments. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in here, and i think this is super neat. I think this is really really interesting and i think it's a massive plus now, let's talk about activity, the activity tab is there to show you what you've been doing with your account.

It shows you where you've been buying stuff selling stuff. Some of this is my actual buying. Some of this is me testing things out. So don't take anything what i'm doing here as what my actual strategy is, but i'm not very convinced by this tab either.

You can't filter things. You can't select just the transactions or just the share sales or just free shipping. You can't go and select anything, it's just everything bundled into one. You have to scroll down ages to go and get like stuff from a bit further back.

It's not particularly practical. It's not particularly useful and again, i just feel like this. Entire tab really needs a lot of work to make it actually helpful. Now let me quickly talk about safety.

A lot of people are concerned because there are new companies starting out that they've never heard of that. Don't have an existing old-school reputation. Are they safe? What happens with your money? How protected is it and the truth is? I don't have any real issues here: free trade is fully regulated by the fca. They are uk based company.

They are forced to do things in certain ways like your funds have to be in particular types of bank accounts or particular types of banks. There's a lot of protections in place to protect both your money and your assets and in fact, both your cash sitting in your account and assets up to a total value of 85 000 pounds are protected by the financial services compensation scheme in the uk. So that means if the worst thing was to happen, which is highly unlikely and the company was good to go under and your money was for some reason not accessible in the process. Then the uk government essentially threw the regulatory body would then pay you out, and these payouts happen relatively quickly and you get all the money back.

That was sitting in that account, so that i think, is sufficient for most people who want to go and get started for most people who are concerned, and i personally think that protection means that people are more likely to try out new players who are significantly disrupting The market, if you're interested in trying it out, make sure you go and do so. It is pretty much free. If you want to go and just see what the app looks like you don't even have to go and trade us stocks and pay that fee. You can just go and play around for free and if you do go and set up an account and then fund, it so put some money into the account and make sure you go and click my link in the description below to do it before you go And set it up, then you can go and get yourself a free share, so you can get actually something in your account alongside the money that you put in to get you started, which is interesting, which is a great way to start investing.

I hope you guys found this useful if you have make sure you smash the like button for the youtube algorithm, make sure you subscribe to this channel for more interesting videos about investing about personal finance and all things money. Thank you so much for watching. I really really appreciate it and i'll see you guys later. You.