Full Orca app review

So I was always going to do a follow up article after doing a write up on the pre-alpha of this new investing platform, Orca.

I was granted full alpha access back in October and had some fake money to play around with and invest into companies. The first thing I noticed when I was given full access and had a look around was that there were only UK companies on the London Stock Exchange available. This is a huge downer for me because I regret to say they’re not much going on in the UK market. I like to invest in innovation and most of the action is happening across the Atlantic. We have a few interesting companies coming up here, like Revolut and Transferwise but these aren’t public at the moment. I’m not interested in Greggs – the only upside to that stock is the Covid recovery, Greggs isn’t innovating and no I don’t count the vegan sausage roll.

The user interface of the app could use some work in my opinion, it’s not bad to look at but kind of has that first draft feel to it. Definitely needs some more work put into it. I like the fact they have tutorials in the app because a lack of education in this world can lose you money. The customer support is great, extremely fast and friendly; hopefully they can keep it up as they scale because Freetrade’s has slowed considerably as they grew.

As part of the launch marketing, they had a waitlist with prizes in the form of shares for the winners. To win you had to be in the top 100 users on waitlist and everyone was guaranteed at least £100. To go up the list you needed to invite more people to sign up, complete the onboarding tasks and give beta feedback. By the time they launched just before Christmas I was in 98th place so I just made the cut and won £100 worth of… trash. I mean Barclays.

The stocks were in my portfolio just after Christmas before markets closing for the holiday. I sold as soon as possible for ~£97 because of course Barclays deprecated immediately.

To sum up, I think Orca carries a lot of potential but it’s not where I’d like it to be at the moment . They need to work on the UI and get US stocks on the platform, which they are working on because it’s listed on the public roadmap.

If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself here’s my referral link. https://orca.app/rBVVYE

When you deposit £50 and make 3 trades we’ll both get a free share