@Scrooge_McCodf is right, having to sell is complete and utter rubbish.
Trading212 has been offering fractional for a while and itās a feature thatās heavily advertised, a main selling point and having this conflict with that is just unacceptable.
Was this just left on the back burner all this time? Should of at least sent a message to us users explaining what will happen.
I really expected better from Trading212. @David I hope you guys do remedy this before the split.
I just watched a YouTube video stating the same thing about fractional shares across a lot of platforms in U.K. and USA. So I assume it is across the board rather than a per platform policy.
I donāt like to criticize the trading 212 team because i know they are really busy with pies etc. But the fact that fractional shares are used for such a long time already, and they still get closed when a split is happening is not goodā¦ You kinda withhold small investors from investing for the long term.
Convert whole shares
Sell fractions for cash
Buy new fractions with cash
Barring minimal annoyance and the need for 30 seconds of your own time to reinvest cash proceeds into new fractional shares - what have you lost? What is the problem here?
I think fractions should be converted by T212ā¦but they wonāt be (for now) so work around it.
This seems like a lot of unnecessary noise. Nothing bad is happening here. You will not be screwed over in any way.
I completely agree. I see nothing wrong with the way Trading 212 are handling this. Suppose you had 2.95 shares. You will get 8 shares and around $400. You can repurchase 4x0.95 new shares for close to $400, maybe cost a dollar more. Just be glad you own AAPL shares and are benefitting from the strong appreciation they are showing.
Hereās an idea. There also remains plenty of time before August 24 for you to top up your shareholding of 2.95 to 3.01, say, and then you will receive only a small amount of cash when the split occurs.
One wonders why AAPL thinks this is a good idea. With fractional shares becoming so widespread, a high share price is not the deterant to small investors that it once was. Look at AMZN and GOOG. Perhaps there are those who for OCD reasons like their shareholdings to be multiples of 10, 50, 100, 500 . For such people this may be a help.
Like you say it doesnāt really matter. Itās just a cosmetic psychological thing. And Apple is all about perception.
Overall, I agree with both you and Richard on this matter, but it would be preferable for the sale of fractions not to happen. Itās not a big deal if it does but I see two main issues:
Firstly there may be a significant delay between when T212 sell the shares and when an account gets credited the money from the sale. This may result in investors missing out on some increases (or you may be lucky and avoid a fall). This can be significant if you have a small porftolio and hence you own less than 1 Apple share (hence all your holding is a fraction, no full share).
However, in order to avoid this and minimise this discrepancy it may be best to manually sell the fraction close to closing time on the 23rd of August and then buy again at market opening on the 24th.
Secondly, the sale of the fractional shares may incur in unforeseen tax to be paid to the tax authorities.
So I definitely think that where possible, it would be more convenient for investors to round up or down the investment (buy selling or buying more) to be full shares and avoid this issue.
At least in the UK there would be minimal tax consequences since a repurchase within 30 days of a sale provides the cost basis for the sale and sums involved will be so close that only the tiniest capital gain or loss will occur.
I also would like to see a facility for making a purchase order that rounds up a fractional holding to a whole number, and similarly a facilty to sell an entire fractional part. At present this is not possible since one can only add and subtract from pies by value, and out of pies by fractions with smaller numbers of decimal places.
I wonder what will happen of someone has Apple in 2 pies, say 0.6 in one pie and 0.5 in another. Will both fractions be sold, or will they get 4 new shares while 0.1 is sold? If the later, to which pies will the shares be allocated?
Presently it is impossible to manually sell the fractional part of a holding of say 2.335435 shares. Impossible in a pie to sell exactly 0.335435. Out of pie one can only set a buy or sell quanity to 4 decimal places.
I did not know thisā¦
I found the link, in case anyone wants to read on it:
Yes. It is a useful rule to know. Means you can reorganise where you hold stock without triggering capital gains. Eg, sell with broker A, repurchase with broker B. Lose only the spread, which can be taken as a capital gains loss against other gains in your end of tax year self assessment.
This way of transferrig can be less expensive than paying an in specie transfer fee (eg degiro 10 euros, AJ Bell Ā£25). Though AJ Bell costs 1% fx on sale of US shares, so in specie will be better, and UK shares have stamp duty. But GBP ETFs would be good this way.
Agreed. I did mean to mention this. Yes, T212 have not had a great track record of speedy corporate actions processing. I would hope that given the bad PR a delay in processing AAPL could lead to that T212 prioritise this. No one needs a āzero fee brokers come with limitations and dangersā newspaper hit piece again! I think we can safely assume some of the new brokers will balls it upā¦ hopefully thats not T212.
Hi @David,
I have 1.39 bought manually
and 0.46 in pies
total 1.85 shares of apple.
If i buy 0.15 more manually to make the total 2 will that be enough?
Or will I need to make sure both manually and pies are in whole numbers to get the split?
Best.
Great question, my assumption would be no, I donāt see how it would work
Sell all your shares before the split happens then buy back
Naa lol, after doing some research and as a few days have gone past theres more info regarding the split, it was new to me at the time. Now i realize that obv everythings gonna be the same, and ive got some apple stock at a good price which i will keep forever 
And if im not mistaken, on Trading 212 the fraction shares wont be multiplied by 4x, only the whole shares. So like 1 share will be 4 shares, but 1.05 wont be 4.2 shares, it will just be 4 shares and the inital 0.05 shares will be sold
Exactly, If they say no in the instance you stated, just sell the shares in your pie and buy the remainder. Then youāll have two whole shares outside of the pie. Then after the split just put it back into the pie
Is there a cutoff date for the split?
24th rings a bell.
ā¦
Iāve read this thread multiple times now and still canāt find anyone who has answered about the pie question.
If you hold some fraction of Apple in a pie and some fraction of Apple outside of a pie but the total adds up to more than a whole number, do you get the split?