Hi i have a problem with the way Trading 212 handles my fractional share purchase.
I hold Markel stock and i built this up by buying 0.05 shares and now i have 5 shares in total. Today i decided to buy some more and did the same as i have previously and purchased 0.05 shares. I am careful to select the quanity and not by actual cash amount. On my third purchase where i selected 0.05 shares, Trading 212 system purchased 0.05041116 instead of 0.5. Now i have some strange number of shares and i want to get it back to a two decimal place number. When i try and input a qty number which would make it again to a two decimal number say for example 5.25 shares, the system does not allow me to do it and says you can only input to a 5 place decimal.
I now have 5.25041116 shares and would like to get this to 5.30 for example but when i input the required amount which is to eight decimal places , the system doesnt let me do it and says you can only input up to 5 decimal place. Why did T212 system purchase an odd number when i put 0.05 in the first place.
This is really annoying. Can someone at T212 tell me how i correct this please?
Hi. OK I have a few comments (which may be worthless - wdik)
Firstly I can understand people who like nice round numbers of shares but personally I like the fractional share functionality. If you buy a quantity of shares T212 any platform will essentially round the transaction to the penny. If you buy a monetary amount in T212 you’ll get a much more precise purchase. If you are only making large transactions it won’t be an issue but if you place small orders you will possibly get very slightly more (ie your 0.00041116) shares by using monetary amounts.
If you want to round it back to a whole number the problem is that T212 won’t let you place a quantity order with more than a set number of decimal places. A hack around this is set a limit order for the bulk of your holding and then place a second order for everything else. Let say you have 101.0012345 shares. Set an order to sell 100 (which therefore removes these from the tradeable holding) and you can then set an order to sell 1.0012345 shares. You can then delete the limit order to sell the 100 shares. Not sure T212 approves of this but I think it works. The caveat is that the second order has to be above the minimum financial amount (ie £1).
If you placed a market order, it is possible that the system purchased more shares due to more rapid price action at the time of the order execution.
In such situations, should you be unable to bring the number of shares using a regular order to buy more shares or sell some, you can try the following:
Create a Pie
Add only the fractional Markel shares in the Pie using the “Import” function
