What's up you guys, sasha here, i've recently made quite a few videos about training to one two, and i have personally used them for quite some time now. So i thought it is about time for me to do a comprehensive, in-depth review, telling you everything there is to know about trading two one. Two now in this video, i'm gon na go through all the quirks and features of trading. Two one two: i'm going to dive deep on all the good things there is to say about it and there is a lot of those things to talk about, but i'm also later on, gon na mention some of the bad things.

Some of the things i don't like about trading 202 and some of the things that i think you should be aware of so make sure you keep on watching for that bit. If you want to get the most comprehensive picture because up front i'll, tell you some of the more popular some of the more interesting things, but some of the quirks, some of them lesser known bits, i'm gon na get to just a little bit later. Now i've worked in the finance industry, my entire career, i started out working as an analyst in a big american bank and i went to progress through to over the last six years being an advisor and consultant to some of the world's largest finance companies. So hopefully, this review will come at a slightly different angle, maybe from a slightly different point of view to some of the others that you might come across now.

Having said that, i am not a financial advisor. If you do need financial advice, i can't provide it to you and you need to go and look for it somewhere else. Now that i've got that out of the way, let me get to the most important bit first, why should anyone go and pick trading 212, and the answer is simple. I recently did a review of all the different investing apps that are available in the uk.

I actually focused on only the best ones but told you why i don't like and don't recommend some of the others, and in that review trading 202 came out top. They came out to be the best one in my opinion in the uk, and there are really good reasons that i'm going to get to in just a second. But the really interesting thing is that trading 212 know themselves that they are the best investing app in uk by some martian, because, unlike everybody else, so all the other investing apps when they go and compare themselves to their competitors, they will show you themselves again. Some of the old-school kind of established old companies that don't do the new fractional shares or the new apps or the fee free trading, or anything like that trading.

212, don't trading 202 when they go and show you how they fare against their competition. They literally show you their main competition. They show you free trade to show you revolut and they show the same hardware's lands down that everyone else does as well, so that you can get a genuine understanding of where they stand. That is a really good sign.

That means they really rate themselves and they think that they can do much better than everyone else now to answer the most personal question: yes, trading 212 is completely entirely 100 free to use. There are no deposit fees, there are no management fees, there are no monthly fees, there are no transaction fees, there are no forex fees, there are no spread markups and there are no any other kinds of fees that you might think of. There is no premium version of the account which you have to pay in order to get access to features that the free one doesn't give you now. Having said that, there is a small disclaimer that is, there are some fees.

If you are trading in the cfd side, i'm going to get to that in just a second, but for the regular investor for the person who just wants to put some of their money in the stock market for the long term. They're not doing some kind of aggressive day trading leveraged trades or anything like that. The isa account and the general investment account are entirely free. There is one charge that they recently introduced that i wanted to mention in this, and that is you have to go and pay for deposits if you are making them using card or card like tools like google pay or other things like that.

Now, that's not that big a deal because the first 2 000 pounds worth of money that you put in is still completely free, even if you use a card, but any money after that will attract to 0.7 charge. But there are other options like just doing a regular bank transfer, which is completely free for you to do, and trading 2 will not charge you any fees. If you do it that way, so there is an alternative method for depositing your money, which is completely free. So i still think that completely free monica stands, but even better than just being completely free trading 202 actually offer you a free share.

If you sign up using my link in the description below and if you go and sign up by clicking that link and filling in all your details, you will get a free share worth up to 100 pounds given to you absolutely for nothing just to get. You started, all you have to do is sign up and deposit the minimum amount, which is one pound. Now, why is trading 212? So great? In my humble personal opinion, let me tell you first, they offer the three different types of accounts that you can have with them and you can open one or two or all three. It is up to you, two of them that i mentioned are for regular investors.

The general investment account and the stocks and shares isa account the stocks and shares isa essentially allows you to go and invest in the market without having to pay any capital gains, tax or dividend tax or any other tax that you might think other than regulatory compulsory Taxes like paying stamp duty or the withholding tax on the us dividends and other such like things, but i'm not gon na get into the details of that. That's just general invest in terminology. If you want to go and be able to invest money, then withdraw it at some point in the future and not have to pay tax on whatever the gain in that investment has been. You can go and open an isa account.

There are a bunch of rules that you need to be aware of. I'm going to link a video in the description below where i go through those in a bit more detail, but anyway, there is a cfd option as well. This is for experienced professional traders. This is not for people who don't know what they're doing.

This is not for people who aren't very experienced in investing and know exactly what managing the different leverage positions means and exactly how you should operate it. So i would not recommend personally anyone who doesn't really know what it is they're doing, that they go and open one of the cfd accounts or trade it. You should only go there once you are experienced, but anyway, let's park that for now i'm going to talk about the isa account and the regular investment account from now on. In terms of the rest of this review.

In these accounts, you have access to over 10 000 different stock, ctfs funds and all kinds of other assets you can go, invest in. That is huge. They have risen massively over the last few months. They have been adding them month after month, sometimes in really huge batches, and you can now go, invest in 10, 000 wares just a few months ago.

It was only 3 000.. It is way more than any of their competition offers. It there's more than twice as much as you can get on free trade and it's something like 13 times as much as what revled offers. So you're definitely going to be spoiled for choice in terms of things that you can go and invest your money in, but probably their most valuable and most useful and most liked feature is their fractional shares.

Now, what fractional shares mean is that you don't have to have the full amount of money that you need to go and buy one share of any particular company. You can go and spend much less than that in buying just portions of it. It means that you don't own a full share and it means that when dividends are distributed, you only get that relative fraction of the dividend, but that's not material, because that means that you have access to investing in large numbers of different companies without having to be Incredibly rich to do so, you can go and buy 0.91 shares of amazon instead of one share for three thousand two hundred dollars, and you can spend just thirty bucks doing that. Instead, you can go and invest in lots of these different companies with just say a thousand pounds or two thousand pounds or however much you're planning to put into your investment account without having to put 10 or 100 times that to get the same companies in your Portfolio that is really phenomenal.

They have executed the fractional shares better than the competition who are doing the same in that they are going to more decimal points. That means, however, much you invest down to the penny. You'll be able to get the equivalent amount of fractional shares that that amount buys with some of the others. The decimal points are narrower, and that means that every time you do a trade, if you're trying to buy, say 10 pounds 80 of a particular stock.

They might write it down and you're. Only gon na buy 10 pounds. 75 you're gon na have that 5p lying around, which you can't go and invest in anything until the next time. You come into some money and you go and do a trade.

It's not a big deal, but i just love that attention to detail the trading to until you put into designing these types of features. Another really interesting feature that they have is the ability to auto invest money that you have into a predetermined distribution of companies that they call pies. I'm going to get to a more detailed description of that in just a second. But let me get through some of the other benefits.

One is that they allow you to trade both on desktop and on your mobile device. Both are offering you 100 functionality, which is really great and surprisingly, their biggest competitors. Don't do it with revolut and with free trade. There is no desktop option at all.

So if you like to have more information available in a slightly easier interface, you won't be able to do that. Some of the old school providers of investment apps don't actually have a mobile application. You can only do it by a desktop. The next important feature is, whenever you do do the trades trading to want to execute them immediately.

Now the immediately bit does come with an asterisk and there is a quirk i'm going to get to because sometimes it's not quite immediate, just like that. But let me get to that in just a fraction, because the others don't do that with some of the competition. You have to wait until the end of that day, or sometimes until the next day, to make the trade and with trading to one two. If you make the trades during opening market hours, that trade will go and be executed pretty much as soon as you've gone and clicked.

The button, if you make a trade outside of trading hours trading toronto, will then execute at the moment that particular market of whatever trade that you're making opens, which is super neat. Even that is a feature that is just not available with any other provider. They either do it at the end of the next working day or, for example, with free trade at 3 pm, the next working day or some other weird variant. Nobody goes and allows you to do the most common sense version, which is go untraded, either immediately or at the next possible available time.

The last important thing that i wanted to mention in this section is the fact that trading 202 is fully regulated by the fca. In the uk, your money is protected by the financial services compensation scheme, so any amount that you hold in free trade up to 85 000. Pounds is protected by essentially the uk government, and that means if something was to happen, free trade was to just go bankrupt, disappear off the face of the earth. You would have that money paid out to you relatively quickly by the uk government because they have access to information as to where your money was now.

That is really great to know, but because they're regulated by the fca, there are additional benefits like they have to hold your money. In particular, types of bank accounts particular types of banks in order for that money to be protected so that the company can't go and get just access to it without you enabling them to get that access. There's a lot of security features around it, which uh protect. You in more ways than just a compensation scheme, so i would say: that's really neat.

Some of the other online providers of trading investment options that are not uk based that are not regulated by the fca in the same way, will not offer you exactly the same kinds of protections. Now let me tell you really quickly how you're going to open a trading 212 account. It is super easy and it is super fast. I have a whole video where i literally go through that process live on screen.

You can go and follow i'm going to link that in the description below as well, and you can go and check out how easy or difficult it is for yourself. But you can go and do it on your mobile. You can go and do it on your desktop once you've clicked my link in the description below to make sure you go and get that free share. You have to go and click that link before you sign up for the account you can go and answer just a few simple questions.

It is really really quite quick. You need to have your national insurance number to hand and that's pretty much. The only thing that you need to have that isn't obvious on the form and you go and answer those questions, and just in a few minutes your account should be set up. You can go and invest any amount.

You like with some of the other providers, the minimums, are very, very high here. The minimum amount that you can put into your account is one pound. Now, if you're transferring money, you may well want to go and put more than one pound, because one pound is not going to give you very much in terms of investment power, but you can decide exactly what you want to invest without any minimum amounts pressurizing. You remember there is that 0.7 charge if you invest more than 2 000 pounds using a card.

So if you're investing larger amounts, do a bank transfer some other option that doesn't cost you money, even if you're investing less than two thousand pounds for anyone, starting with trading to one two for the first time or actually any other investment platform, i would strongly recommend Not using a credit card because credit cards may treat that as a cash transaction, and you will then have to pay a three percent fee and much higher daily rates of interest than normal transactions. You don't want to get into that kind of thing. It's generally not a good idea to use your credit card to fund investments in any case, but those fees might not be very pretty if your credit card provider decides to charge you now. Let me get my phone and talk about some of the quirks and features that i mentioned previously, because i think some of these are important.

I'm going to start with some of the positives and some of the interesting things about the app that maybe are not going to be obvious to somebody who hasn't used it before or somebody who's new to it. And, first of all, some people in some reviews will tell you that the information that they provide about any particular company is not as detailed as perhaps it should be. They tell you that it isn't as easy to follow and i see where they're coming from, because it isn't as colorful or as bright or maybe as sort of simply laid out as some of the other apps. But i actually think the amount of information here is perhaps better and perhaps more and perhaps more detailed.

You get access to the basic p, l, the balance sheet and the cash flow, and for each of these they show you the last three years worth of data. You can break it up into quarters and you can go and deep dive to look at any of these numbers in a lot more detail where you click the little link below each of those sections. You can go and scroll through these tables see exactly what each of the items is making your mind. So, if you genuinely want to understand quickly what numbers are this thing is great.

Having said that, i wouldn't use any investment app to make my investment decisions. I'd be looking at lots and lots of different data information from different sources. I wouldn't just use the description here and the few graphs here, but for a quick check for a quick, just understanding of maybe some additional stuff or to confirm some of the thinking you already have. This is perfectly good enough for me next, when you do go and buy or sell stocks.

There are interesting options that are not available from some of the other providers that you can go and use in particular, you can use limit orders, you can go and do stop orders. You can do stop limit, there's all the different options that sometimes people actually charge. Additional money for available as part of the free app, which i think is really really useful. I also like the fact that if you go and hit menu and go and look at videos, they have quite a lot of really interesting, really quite decent content in there.

That educates you all about investments all about how to use the app and everything in between, and that is certainly better than what i've seen from pretty much any of the other apps. This is completely free. This is accessible and youtube accessible through the app. I think this is really really good.

A couple of other points. There's a really useful history feature where you can go and look at all the different transactions that you've ever made. All the different dividend payouts you've received all the different orders that you've made. This is really really handy for anyone who wants to go and do any kind of analysis looking back at exactly what they did when they did to try to make up their minds.

It's probably gon na help you if you do lots and lots of trades, because there's gon na be a lot of entries in there, but it's really really nice to have that feature. One other really important point. If you have a share that you want to sell in your account, let's say you use my link in the description below and you got a free share, but you don't want to keep it if you go and sell it and you hit that button. Make sure that at the top it is selected as number of shares, not value and the reason there is, if you select value and then the price of the share increases between when you hit the button and when the sell actually happens, you might find that you Are sitting there with a few pence of a share in your account that you can't do much with, and even if you do sell it, you can't then go and reinvest it in something else.

You'll have to go and sell another share, so you have at least a pounds worth of money to then go and reinvest in something else so make sure when you're selling round numbers of shares that you select the number of shares option at the top. It's just a little thing that can get a little bit annoying if you don't get it right now really quickly. Let me talk about trading 212 pi's. I made an entire video that talks about pies in a lot more depth.

I'm going to link that video in the description below as well, so you can go and look at it over there, but in short, next to your investments in the app. You also have this pie feature and you can go and look at the pies. I currently have two random pies set up. One is my sashi ancient pie where i used the investment distribution that i had a few days ago to create a new pie and you have to go manually manage these.

I only have 100 pounds in there at the moment. I haven't gone and put my entire portfolio into a pie just yet, because i'm still formulating and i'd like to be a little bit more agile. But i also have my s p. 500, where i have a distribution of booster and v usd so i have an etf in dollars and etf and pounds separate questions.

Why i'm doing that? But anyway, these pies are super super useful. If you like, to just be able to go and deposit a fixed amount of money and the app will automatically distribute your money into a number of different pre-selected companies, there is a really interesting feature where you can go and take your existing portfolio and import it Into a pie that you just created, so you have to manually create all the distributions you hit holdings in your pie. You then go and scroll to the bottom and there's a more actions button, and then there is an import investments and then you can go and select the different companies that you want to import from the ones that you currently hold in your non pi account and It will automatically distribute them based on the amounts that you currently hold and then those shares will migrate from your account to your pie. So that's really handy if you want to start being a bit more easy going with your investment, so you just deposit the money and then let trading 202 take care of the money moving and now.

Having said that, the main reason that they're doing pies is because, in my opinion, they want to do something similar to what etoro's doing with copy trader, but this is still a super early integration, so they've made pies somewhat sociable. You can now go and click on the menu option and hit pi library, and in this pi library you can go and look at some of the popular pies that exist that people created. Some people are recreating investment options that are not available in the uk like arc, invest and things like that, but you can go and look at what they do. You can go and hit one of these and look at some of the comments and stuff like that.

You can go and copy the pie by just hitting the copy pie button and you can adjust some of the distributions if you want. But this is not particularly useful because, if you're wanting to really follow what somebody else does you'll have to manually make this copy. All the time to make sure that your distribution matches what they're doing, and you won't get automatic changes to your pi if they go and change the one that you've copied. In essence, it's just a vertical snapshot at one point in time of what somebody else's pie looks like, and i don't think that's particularly useful.

I am expecting they're gon na make a lot of improvements and changes to the section over time as it stands. I just don't think it's particularly useful. I don't think it really does very much and i don't think it really adds much to what people can do. I think this pi library is more of a gimmick.

You can't search by any kind of criteria. There is just no real utility to it, but let's see what happens in the future now, as promised, let me cover some of the things that i don't like. So much by trading two and two, and i'm going to start with a quirk that i personally don't like that. Most people, probably don't even know, exists, and that is if i have fractional shares, because i've bought something that where i invested an amount of pounds - and it automatically gave me the correct number of shares, if i want to go and sell it, let's say i want To sell some of my adobe, i have, as you can see, on the previous screen, 0.8687318 of a share of adobe, and if i want to go and sell it, and let's say i only want to have not point eight of a share remaining.

So i need to go and say: sell 0.0687318 0.0687318. Let's go and try to do that. So i'm gon na sell an amount over here, not point not six. Seven, three one eight and you can see the issue here.

The amount of decimal points available when you're selling shares is not the same as the amount of decimal points that you can actually hold in shares so and, if you say, have 5.12345 whatever number of shares, and you want to round it down, you only want to Have a round number of shares because you want to streamline your portfolio or you want to get round numbers of multiples of dividends or whatever other reason. You can't actually go and sell the exact number of the fractional shares unless you go and sell the max, and the next point is closely related. Let's say i want to go and buy a bit more of amd and i have some money in my account. I hit buy and i decide hey.

I want to go and buy as much money as i can now. If i go and scroll the amount, the slider, it doesn't actually tell me how much money i have that i can invest, it doesn't tell there's no option to hit max, i can go and deposit more money, i can go and type, but if i don't know, There's nothing on the screen that actually tells you how much it is that you can. You can slide it so that it turns black from being red, but the only way to find out is you have to go hit back hit. The drop button see that you have 12 pounds 24 then go back into the buy mode, then go and type in 12 pounds 24 and that's the only way that you're going to be able to go and buy those shares.

You can't go and do this exact process by just hitting some kind of button which free trade offers, which i think is really really useful, and i'm just surprised that there's no way of doing it. Because if say, you sell an amount or something and want to immediately move it into something else, there's no good way of doing it. You have to go back and remember the exact pound value, and only that way can you do it now another one. That's very closely linked to the one that i just said is the fact that there's no option to sell everything if i go and want to sell my entire portfolio, for example, off a particular company.

The only way i can do it is by sliding all the way to the right and then there'll be a number showing up over here and that's how you can sell the entire amount. But if you are not quite sure, is that actually the entire amount, or is that just where the slider got you to it's, not very obvious? I feel there should be some kind of button saying all or maybe it should tell you when you set it all the way to the right that that is your full amount or some kind of indicator, because it's really not clear. So i think, all of these little usability things could really be improved slightly if you want to go and exit all of your positions, there's also no clean way of just going and saying. I want to sell everything you have to go into individual stocks and go and sell them.

If somebody knows exactly how you do it, maybe there is somewhere in the menu that i haven't discovered. Yet that would be pretty neat, but, as i can see it, i can't just go and cash everything i have to go into individual stocks and sell each one in turn. The other point i want to make is, if you are doing your trades during us market open hours, it can be a little bit on the slow side now, sometimes - and actually i think, most times it is pretty fast - it happens within one to two seconds. So you hit the button and the trade goes through really really simple.

But if you are trading when the market's really busy, if you're going and making those trades, when lots of other people are doing them as well, it might take a few seconds and in some cases, as long as 30 seconds or even a minute. But that's not a big deal in my personal opinion for people who are investing for the long term for people who are investing for stocks for the next year or two years or maybe several months. If you are not day trading which, in my opinion, people shouldn't be unless they really know what they're doing, i don't think this is that much of an issue. The last point i wanted to make is that progress is not tracked very well now at the top of your screen over here.

It tells you what your return number is. It tells you that you're 24 or 25 percent up, but my problem with this is that doesn't really mean much because i've invested money into this for the past several months and including yesterday. And what this number tells me is that the average return on all the money i've ever put into it is 24. But what does that mean? Does that really help it's not annualized in any way? I can't go and click on it and understand in any more depth as to what my investments from earlier on have done versus more recent ones.

I can't go and understand, say the performance of individual stocks. I can click on individual stock and i can go down and it will tell me what my history of investments has been, and it does tell me if the amounts that i've held in it have gone up or down here, i'm 4.4 down on my adobe investments, But again, it's not particularly useful in trying to understand you know. Did i perform well in the early trades, any kind of graphs or any kind of annualized view of this? So i think on the analytics, if they want people to understand better, whether they're doing well or whether they're not doing well, this can probably improve. But having said that, on most of the points that i just mentioned, none of the competition do any better.

It's not like there are other companies that do any of the things that i mentioned better. In fact, the reason that some of these quirks and negatives potentially or maybe areas of improvement exist, is because trading 212 are doing things that the other companies are not doing. Their fractional shares are ahead of the market. Their ability to trade instantly and quickly is ahead of the market, so this is by no means some kind of list of things i really dislike about trading 202..

This is more like a list of improvements that i'd like them to get to at some point. In the future, i hope you guys found this useful. If you have please make sure you smash the like button for youtube algorithm, it helps the channel grow in this video to reach more people a huge amount. So if you haven't done so already, please go and turn that thumb blue if you're interested in more videos about investments about personal finance and all things money make sure you subscribe to this channel.

That is exactly what i talk about in every single video. Thank you. So much for watching and i'll see you guys later you.