About fractional shares transfer to another account

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1

Hi, let’s imagine I buy 100 USD worth of an ETF in which each share sells for 600 USD.
I buy it through fractional shares, but somehow by keeping on buying it, I will eventually have a share worth of it. Let’s take this scenario.

So my question is the following: if Trading 212 allowed the transfer of shares to another broker (which I know it doesn’t right now, but is planning to) that doesn’t allow fractional shares, how would that process in this case?

  • Would I be unable to do it and be forced to sell the shares, since they were bought fractionally?

  • Or since I had 1 share worth of investment, would I be able to transfer a full share of that ETF to the other broker? And in this case, what would the buying price of the share be? The mean price?

Thank you, and I’m sorry if it is a dumb question, but had to ask.

Cheers.

2

I would say it doesn’t matter about fractions, the account that T212 holds at IBKR would be in whole shares. It’s just their database that says how much of a stock is owned by you. If you can transfer shares in future I assume whole shares and you’ll get cash for the current bid for any fractions left over.

I should add you have two prices for any share the ask (buy) and bid (sell). These are indicative of what the trade will be done at.

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3

Thank you for the answer. I imagine something like that would happen, yes. But I wonder what the share price would be registered at, after the transfer, since the ETF was bought at different prices many times.

4

It doesn’t matter if you bought it once or many times.

Say you bought three times:

0.4 share (this cost you 30p)
0.4 share (this cost you 30p)
0.4 share (this cost you 40p)

so you have 1.2 shares worth and spent 100p acquiring them.

If you can transfer then only the 1 would be and the 0.2 would be turned into cash.

So if the bid (sell) was at 100p per share, you would receive ~20p cash for the 0.2 fraction.

The 1 share in the new broker would then be sold at around whatever the bid is at the time of needing to sell.

So say the bid then went to 120p a share, you would receive ~120p if you sold it.

So if you got that 20p and 120p you received 140p in total.

Those three 0.4 buys cost you originally a total of 100p.

That means you made 40p profit in total.

:partying_face:

And just to clarify I’m using ~ for around because it’s indicative.

So if you are buying and the ask is at 100p, and you pay full ask then the trade is at 100p
If you are selling and the bid is 95p, and the receive that bid then the trade is at 95p

The 5p difference between what is being asked and the bid is the spread. So when selling you’ll be wanting to look at the bid (sell) price.

Depending on liquidity you may find some slippage, and the spread changes.

When you look on Google/Yahoo what you’ll be seeing is the last trade price (as it what the last person just paid or received when buying or selling), not the ask or bid.

So the ask could be 100p, the bid at 95p. The last trade could be 99p paying almost full ask (most likely a buy)

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