Axl Crawford
Axl Crawford

4 min read

UK Investing: Freetrade vs Trading 212

Lately, I’ve been considering opening a Freetrade ISA as it’s my first and main investment platform. I plan on accelerating my investments over the next year so an ISA makes sense for tax purposes. To throw a spanner in the works, I’ve been looking into Trading 212 as it’s got lots of cool features that Freetrade simply lacks i.e. auto-investing pies, better deposits, real-time prices to name a few.

You’d think it would be simple, go with the one that’s got more features right? Wrong.

Trading 212’s user experience (UX) and interface (UI) are bad, it’s so unintuitive and ugly. I find it difficult to find anything whereas Freetrade is far more intuitive, although not perfect. Anyway, this fuelled my reluctance of just switching over to a Trading 212 ISA.

Yesterday, I just decided to ask Freetrade why I should choose them over Trading 212 to see what they say on the matter.

Here’s my query:

I’m going to be a bit cheeky here but I need answers lol

I love FreeTrade, it’s the platform that introduced me to investing so I hold it dear in that regard. Lately, I’ve been considering moving to the ISA but I’ve had a look over at Trading 212 which has some really compelling features such as; real time prices, 3 month view, better deposits, auto-investing, separate view for portfolio/watchlist, ratios and data to name a few.

So before I go deeper and get an ISA or even Freetrade Plus, I’d like for you to tell me why I should stay with Freetrade.

Their response:

Here at Freetrade we care about our customers access to invest smartly. Whereas 212 offer many volatile stocks and CFD products which often result in customers losing money. We also thoroughly review our stocks before they are added to our platform.

Companies such as 212 don’t own the software they provide whereas ours has been built from the ground up which will put us in a much better position in the future.

At the end of the day it is down to you where you would like to keep your investments but we would hope you would chose us 👍

I really liked that, one, they didn’t shoot down Trading 212 but instead focused on themselves and two, that it’s their own platform unlike Trading 212. They’re masters of their own destiny. I like that because relying on a third party can really limit your flexibility and negatively harm you going forward.

A good example for this case is how both platforms are handle the forthcoming stock split of both Tesla Motors Inc ($TSLA) and Apple Inc ($AAPL).

If you have a fractional share, Freetrade will split your shares and credit you up to 8 decimal places whereas Trading 212 will simply sell your shares and credit your account.

For example: if you have 0.75 $TSLA shares after the 5:1 split with Freetrade you’ll simply have 3.75 shares but with Trading 212 you’ll have 0 shares and a payout. So if you still want to be invested you’ll have to buy again potentially at a less favourable cost basis.

Overall, Trading 212 has some cool features but I think I will be sticking with Freetrade as my main investment platform and will be getting an ISA soon, maybe even Freetrade Plus in the future which includes the ISA.

If you’re interested trying these out yourself here are my referral links:

Freetrade

Invest in stocks and ETFs commission-free. Sign up here with your email and get a free share worth up to £200 to get started.

https://freetrade.io/freeshare/?code=4SNR5R98UR&sender=O9yBlYco

Trading 212

Do you want to get a free stock share worth up to ‎£⁠100?

Create a Trading 212 Invest account using this link www.trading212.com/invite/GIEfCAjp and we both get a free share!

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