The CEO of freetrade says
But then this
And then the topic was locked 
So what’s the truth? “Fuck the hedge funds” or “we send all our client orders to a company owned by them”???
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Interesting, I guess. can’t say I want to go through link after link to see how it was explained on their end however.
Also interesting is the user groups that appear, R3 and R5. what does that mean in context to Freetrade? their VIP accounts by size or something else? would be nice to be able to make more use of the group feature on this forum.
Crowdfunding Investor badges, so R3 denotes an investor who invested in the Round 3 Crowdcube raise etc.
Both can be (and are) true!
You don’t always have a huge amount of choice of the ownership of necessary intermediaries. It doesn’t mean that there was any impact on FT.
to be a legally regulated company, ownership isn’t allowed to impact the impartiality of service policy for clients really. though that doesn’t always stop individuals from doing something illegal.
Steve Cohen is an absolute piece of work. There is an incredible (but long) article by the New Yorker on the insider trading case that took down his former hedge fund SAC Capital if you fancy a read. Fantastic detail on the case and the portfolio manager who took the fall.
Was Point72 actually caught short on GME? I know Cohen/Point72 is in fairly deep in Melvin but do they have their own short?
But anyway, the flaw with all of these conspiracy theories is this. These hedge funds would be shut down and owners go to prison if they paid off / instructed retail brokerages to stop trading. Whatever they’re losing on the short, I can’t see how they’d prefer the former over taking the loss. Happy to be proved wrong in a few years though… so long as there’s a fantastic movie to go along with it.
Edit: link to SAC Capital (Steve Cohen) insider trading case article - do be warned it’s a long long read Inside the Biggest-Ever Hedge-Fund Scandal | The New Yorker
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And anyway, if there was a massive conspiracy and if those hedge funds that got caught in a bad short position did want to target retail brokerages, they would most likely target the US. The volume coming from UK traders isn’t really comparable, especially not from FreeTrade who are a fraction of the size of T212 in terms of user base.
The reality is very boring. The trade process involves many different links in the chain. Some of these links couldn’t handle the volume and the whole chain fails. For T212 it was IB and for IB it was DTCC. For FreeTrade, it was their FX provider.
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Heh, Drivewealth is also Revolut’s clearing broker.
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