Hi guys, if I use the pies and autoinvest function to invest a certain Amt of money per month, I would end up with a certain Amt of fractional shares.
Apart from the 85,000 guarantee, for fractional shares can I ask who owns the fractional shares? For eg if in the unlikely case t212 goes bust, where will my fractional shares go, do we actually own the fractional shares? Also with fractional shares, are we covered under the 85,000?
Thanks
If I am not wrong, the FSCS protection should be for cash only and not for stocks. They should be intact even if Trading212 goes out of business. But I am not 100% sure if it like this.
My understanding is that fractional shares are treated as cash, and full shares can be transferred to you in the event of bankruptcy (all shares are held as a nominee, basically meaning you own them and everything but on the official books it says Trading 212. It’s just easier)
With the £85,000 thing I’m assuming if for some reason Trading 212 didn’t return your shares their value would be included in the £85,000. But this is a worst case scenario, it’s just protection for you, and the FSCS would not give it to companies that aren’t trustworthy… or else there would be a lot of fraud.
But to end this, I wouldn’t worry about the worst case scenario, it’s highly unlikely to be an issue, even if I’m a bad case something did go wrong you’d probably get everything back without needing the £85,000 protection.
I had thought the investments side was ÂŁ50k cover but I might be wrong.
My understanding of it is T212 has one account under IB.
This one account contains all the shares of its customers. So if it might have say 12,345 shares of AAPL collectively.
In T212 database it then matches up that out of that total you have say 5.5 shares of AAPL under your account.
@David is that correct? Also would T212 work with IB in creating real accounts for each customer and splitting them up in case of bankruptcy?
Yep, this was the main thing I’d wanna know about, because I’m concerned that if in the unlikely scenario t212 goes bust, I want to know that I own the shares, it wouldn’t be liquidated(eg at a loss depending on the market price), and have peace of mind my shares can be traced back to me. As I’m planning on holding these investments for maybe next 20-30 years.
What do you mean when you say treated as cash? Does it mean that my positions(e.g 30.45 shares) would be liquidated in event of bankruptcy?
if your example is 30.45 then 30 shares would transfer and the remaining 0.45 would liquidate as ownership only really goes on the books for whole shares.
but in reality, the FSCS promise is like preparing an armoury just in case a zombie apocalypse happens. it’s there and you will be secure if it somehow happens, but how realistic is it that zombies will suddenly appear and lead to societal collapse? regulations require T212 to hold enough cash reserves to finance the closing operations to transfer all client holdings to a new platform/portfolio manager of their choice and will just require you to have the appropriate forms filled and signed if/when that happens. the protection is for the remote chance client funds are used to finance the move which wouldn’t occur as T212 holds the appropriate reserves.
Exactly, the protection is just there to make people feel protected, I wonder how often they’ve had to pay out because of some big failure 
I think your all being a bit optimistic in thinking the protection is for the zombie apocalypse and it’s never going to be used. The FSCS protection has been used in practice with investment companies who’ve went under, and people have had to claim back money from it.
Among other issues, administrators will charge for this work, you may also be charged to transfer your shares out to a new broker. These things have been paid for as part of the FSCS protection, including paying back from some customers not getting all their assets back.