What's up you guys, sasha here i have made a lot of videos about trading 212 and a lot of them. You've been super positive. I've been saying so much good stuff about how they've come to disrupt the uk investing market, how they've been able to go and offer investing from as little as one pound how you can go and do the investing without having to pay any kind of fees? No transaction fees, management fees, no foreign exchange fees pretty much completely entirely free way to invest either through the normal general investing account or through the completely free stocks and shares i so can. But over the last couple weeks a lot of stuff has happened, and since my last video, where i talked about some of that, a lot more has happened, and so i felt it was really important to go and talk about it now.

I personally have done exceptionally well out of trading two one two. I have managed to go and refer over 260 people who went and clicked my link in description below and those people then got a free share, and so did i, and so i actually made some money from it. But, unlike some people out there, i don't only say good things about a company just because that company happens to pay me money when things need to be said, i'm gon na go and say them. So here goes in a recent video.

I talked a lot about how trading 202, along with major other brokerages around the world, seem to make questionable decisions around some of the stock trades, starting with january 28th, when trading two one, two, along with robin hood, along with some other ones, went and stopped people Being able to go and buy gamestop stock, so gme amc and some others linked to the whole gamestop story. I'm not gon na go down the entire story again, because i'm gon na be going over old ground. If you want to watch that video make sure you go and find it and watch it another time, but whether it was to do with capitalization whether it was to do with the fact that the company didn't have enough money to actually go and put the deposits For those trades, because the amount he had put up was increased, whether it was to do with the fact that interactive brokers or trading 202 or the combination of them simply didn't have the right tech to be able to make that many transactions go through. Because of the demand surge or whether there were some other issues, whether there was pressure from third parties, i don't know whatever the cause.

The situation really really sucked and the almost complete lack of communication from trading to one two, where they didn't really want to tell their customers what was going on. They didn't want to try to explain to their customers, maybe as well as some other people. What was going on that really didn't help, but now there have been a few developments that i really need to talk about, because watching the story unfold patiently, as i have been, things have been happening and i've been trying to sort of say well, i need to Wait to see what actually unfolds from this before i make a video, but now enough has happened that i feel it we need to talk. So, let's do it one day at a time on 28th of january trading, 212 put gamestop, amc and reportedly some other stocks, but i'm not sure i think maybe just those two in reduce only mode.

So that meant that you could only sell the shares of those companies, but you could not buy because there was hedge funds out there that really needed to buy, and it kind of transpired through some mechanisms. That meant that all the big trading platforms had to go and do that. The official ration now, probably that this may well boil down to, although this hasn't been confirmed by trading training212, is the fact that they had to go and put huge amounts of money up. In order to be able to process those transactions and like robin hood, they probably didn't have that kind of cash.

Just sitting around ready for this situation, then, on the 29th of january they posted another message which said the gamestop and amc i8 available for trading, except this didn't seem to be quite true, so this was the friday uh and that message came out and i saw A huge number of i literally saw people trying to go and buy and sell this stuff, and the transactions were not going through. They weren't just delayed, they completely weren't going through and a lot of them were being cancelled. I'm not sure. Maybe some did uh, i'm not aware i didn't haven't actually seen any complete, but i saw a lot that didn't actually make it then, on the 1st of february, which is the monday after that friday they went back and when they said on friday and they put Out the same message, pretty much slightly different word message that said that the stocks are in reduce only mode again blaming the trade execution ecosystem worldwide.

This is at the same time that some other platforms would be perfectly happy to let you go and trade. These same stocks, so you know, i don't think that the statement that the entire global ecosystem relating to trading was the reason is entirely accurate. Shall we say, because it just isn't true, but anyway, let's park that for now so somehow, some of the other platforms didn't suffer from this global problem. That affected trading 212.

now here is where the situation gets more messy. The original notification message from friday. That said that the stocks are now available to be traded somehow managed to disappear from my history app of on on the app. So if you go and look on your trading to one two app, there is a history of all the different notifications you got and all the messages are in that history, except this particular message for some reason: disappeared except i took a screenshot of it because that's The kind of guy i am, i like taking screenshots of things and that's slightly concerning, because somebody actually had to then go and do some work.

You know somebody within trading 202 had to go and do some work to go and remove all these messages from people's histories so that they can go back and see that at that day, apparently they should have been able to trade those stocks. Why would you do that? Why would you go and remove that message from the history, because all the other messages are still there, so it's not like. Maybe it's just me, maybe my app suffered a glitch. I'm not sure tell me in the comments below if you can see the same thing, but this just seems slightly weird, but i guess maybe what they.

What happened was that the message on monday, that sort of replaced the friday message? Maybe that message is the one that they wanted to leave because it sort of superseded it or maybe it updated it except the monday message also got deleted from the app so as it stands, it looks like the original message that said that the stocks were induced Only mode and restricted is there, but there was no update message after that point. According to this history, if you go back to three messages, you will notice that there was never a time when you should have been able to go and buy this stock. So, even though you tried to attempt to buy it, there wasn't any reason why you should have been able to buy it because it was never enabled again now i don't know why they've done it, but the very fact that they have done it puts a light On their situation and kind of begins, asking uncomfortable questions as to why would you go and delete evidence of something that you did at the time if there is no good reason to delete that evidence anyway, i have no idea, i literally don't know, i'm just highlighting Something that i noticed see the best thing is on the tuesday. After on the second, after that monday, the company went and passed themselves.

In the back on twitter, there was a posted message saying they executed 1.7 million stock trades without any limits for some unknown reason. They haven't been doing very much tweeting since then. So here is a really important point here is what's been happening at exactly the same time as this with training 202 immediately after the whole gamestop fiasco happened, they suspended the onboarding of new accounts. So when you had people go and try to sign up for a new account through hitting the links in people's descriptions through whatever, through blog post, they couldn't go and actually go and create a new account and almost immediately after within a day or two.

They went and opened up a new list where you can go and go on the waiting list by providing your email. This is what happened. Their official rationale sounded a little bit like they had capacity issues and their systems couldn't cope with a sudden rush of people. Signing up for new accounts - and here is another issue: if you're a technology company or if you're, a finance company, generally speaking, the way that these types of companies work.

You know, especially companies that operate in 100 countries around the world have millions of customers. You generally should never ever in your life, get even remotely close to full capacity in terms of your processing power. So normally companies have these plans of exactly how their traffic and how their different types of transactions and other things are going to be going. They ensure that their servers and their processing is in place to be able to facilitate all of that.

Then they give themselves way way bigger buffers. They make sure that they don't even get above, say 20 or 50, and then they go and add extra buffers. On top of that, so, generally speaking, these companies make so many redundancy protections to make sure that this situation can't ever possibly happen, except here it did, but here is a slightly different lens in the same situation, and during this period a lot of people were signing Up for new accounts, if you go and look at some other providers, they had a huge surge of new people joining and so we're trading two on two potentially given that they were sort of the best known the biggest platform. They were probably looking at.

Maybe a few hundred thousand people, potentially maybe even more joining the platform over a short period of time and each time one of these people joins a lot of these people join through affiliate links, the sort of links that you know i have in my description below And so do so many other people as well and each time somebody does that trading two one two, then i have to pay something around ten pounds to the person joining in the form of a free share on average and another ten pounds to the person whose Link they clicked so about 20 pounds per account. So if hundreds of thousands of people are going to be joining using those links, they are several million pounds down. Potentially over that period, there is a separate affiliate program that tailors to cfd accounts, which pays considerably more, but i don't know how many people actually sign up through that. I don't know how popular that is.

I certainly haven't seen as many people or as many people talking about it, so i'm presuming most people probably are not doing that. But here's the thing so if they had all these people join and they had to go and put up several million pounds immediately at a point when they're joining, is this pointing uh to a potential cash flow problem? I don't know, but at the same time they had all the issues with you know having to put up more money as deposits for stocks that you could or could not trade, depending on which message it is that you believed um was there. A cash flow problem was there a liquidity problem in the company and if there was, why would you not go unofficially confirm it, because that sounds like a really important thing for a company to make people aware of or if there wasn't, then why would you go And suspend the acquisition during the sort of the hot season during the time when a bunch of people want to go and come onto your platform and give you a whole load of money by setting up accounts and potentially go. And you know trade cfds.

But even if not apparently according to trading 212, even without the cfd side, the business is profitable per account, so each new account is essentially extra money. So why would you turn it down and for a big tech business i mean, i don't know exactly your training done two ways, but for a big tech business for a company that operates massively around the world who deals with billions of pounds worth of transactions and Stuff, increasing your server power, adding more servers, increasing the processing capability and doing all of that is a relatively minor thing and a relatively low cost in the grand scheme of things. So i'm not sure i completely 100 believe, especially with modern cloud computing which trading 212 users just like everybody else. It really doesn't take a huge amount of effort or money to go and be able to quite quickly scale up your processing.

So why would you just not go and do that when there's literally free money knocking on your door, trading 202 have opened up this waiting list and people are on there, and here is another problem. You see what's going to happen at some point, is they're going to go and reopen new account acquisitions and they're going to send an email to everybody on this waiting list? Saying hey, you can go and create an account click here and when they click here and create an account, they won't get a free share. So the official response from trading212 when somebody pointed this out on the forums was yes, but what the customer can do at that point is they can go back and use the original link and they'll still get the free share, except, of course they know, and they Understand that those people will probably forget they're, probably not realized, they'll, probably not be told this explicitly in the email. Maybe they will now now that i've made this video, but i don't know um and the likelihood is they'll just have no idea that they're not actually going to get their free share, even if they did.

They probably won't remember, which particular video it was that they saw two weeks ago and even if they did maybe they'll, go and find they'll have to go and find that video. Then you have to go and find the link in the description below, even though that link might not be there anymore, because the person's not be getting any referrals, so they might have deleted it anyway. You see what i'm getting here. So the likelihood is that they're gon na potentially save themselves several million pounds by doing this, and because of how they're implementing it it kind of raises more questions as to.

Why would you be doing it? You know what is the sort of the rationale behind it, because it isn't that complicated if you're building this brand new previously not used sign up process for a waiting list to just literally go and capture the affiliate link at the point when the person lands on That page and goes through the signup process so that when they create the account, the affiliate link is automatically credited. That would be sort of the logical solution here right, because that literally is just another column in the same table that they're using but um. Maybe i'm just misunderstanding: how complicated that would be to actually implement anyway. So the latest official position on when new accounts are going to be opened from trading to one two on their community that you know a tiny fraction of their user base use is no update.

Whatever that means i'm guessing, they have an update, they're just choosing not to share it, because i suspect the company themselves have some idea. So again, just some questions around transparency and the willingness to actually communicate with people. Am i bitter, because you know i'm not making any money whatsoever from trading to one two, because i used to make a lot of money from their free shares and now i'm not. That's a good question: the answer is no, not at all i'm making plenty of money through my other referral programs and my youtube channel is growing massively, so i'm very very happy with it.

The fact is by making this video, i might be shooting myself in the foot. I might be annoying some people because you know trading212 like it. When i make really positive videos, maybe they don't like this kind of video. So much and i don't know, i hope that they understand that being honest and transparent is a good thing and therefore you know work on improving their service, but it could be that they choose not to continue working with me.

I hope that's not the case, but i just feel like it's really important with every single company that i review and every single company that i talk about to mention all the good stuff when the good stuff is there to mention talk about all the positives and All the upsides, but also when the reverse is true when there are really negative things that need to be said, it is important to go and highlight those just the same. So here's what happened next, on tuesday, the 8th of february, just two days ago from when i'm recording this video three days from when this video comes out. Trading 212 made another move. Now, if you want to make a investment into any kind of stocks or anything uh which is not happening during the live open market market hours, you have to put a minimum of 100 units of whatever currency it is into that trade.

So you have to put at least 100 100 pounds: 100 euros, 100 whatever. If you go and make the trade during live trading hours, it still works fine with just the one pound i actually tested it. I want to bought one pound and 5p of adobe and it went through perfectly fine, so that isn't an issue. But if you want to trade outside hours uh, you have to put at least a hundred dollars or whatever it is in there, and - and this to me is a massive problem because they lured hundreds of thousands or millions of people with very aggressive marketing, which said You can begin doing investing from as little as one pound and some people may not to be physically able to go and do investing during the opening hours.

Maybe they don't have access to a computer, maybe they're at work, maybe they're asleep whatever it is. Your platform provided certain facilities in certain ways that people could interact with it. That was the marketing message. That was the promised thing.

That's why people sign up and then suddenly that gets taken away um because they can't process the transactions and that reason sounds genuine, because if you've used trading 212 at any point over the last few months at that sort of 2, 30 p.m, uk time until 3 P.M - uk time just so 9 30 time over in the us when the markets first open, it is super laggy, super, slow and transactions take a long time to go through. They seem to be unable to cope either them or interactive brokers or whoever. The final clearinghouse is, or the combination of some number of those parties it doesn't really matter. The issue is, there is a massive tech problem because of the number of customers that they managed to onboard.

So the question that i have is, over the last year, over the last few months as they've been booking all of these new customers, as they've been putting all of this effort into building their platform up and getting all the free shares out there and doing all Of that, should they maybe have focused on building a platform that could actually facilitate the trades that those customers would then be doing, because you know that's kind of the point of why those customers are signing up. So they've been investing time with their partners to ensure that the rails are good enough to facilitate high demand for trading sure the situation has happened is unprecedented, but we could have had a big crash. We could have had a big surge in some stocks for whatever external economic reasons, we could have had any number of situations which could also result in a high volume of trading from that high number of customers, and i would have expected that a self-respecting investing platform Would probably pay attention to this, and if they pay attention to this, they probably would want to go and make sure that the platform can actually cope with it. So as it stands, there are a lot of questions.

I really like a lot about trading 212 and i hope that they can clear this up and i really hope that they can improve the way they communicate with their customers, because at the moment, i'm sorry but posting one message every week on that says: no update On a community that nobody visits is just not good enough, i feel like they need to begin building that level of trust back, because, although they are still the by far the market leaders, they have the biggest customer base. They are still completely free to use, and all of that is great. The problem is, if you take your eye off the ball, and if you don't continue treating your customers the right way, those customers may turn their backs on you. They may say i don't want to be dealing with a company where i'm not sure whether i'm going to be able to make trades the next day, i'm not sure what their actual motivations are.

I'm not sure if the stuff they promised me in advertising is actually going to be available to me and other people might join and those people might very quickly go and take market share, and i don't know i really really hope that they go and fix all These things we still have to find out. I hope you guys found this useful. If you have please make sure you smash the like button future but algorithm so that more people can watch this video. Thank you so much for watching.

I really really appreciate it and i'll see you guys later. You.