Is Pie Order Minimum Now 1€ instead of 0.2€?!

🥧 Pies & AutoInvest
21

this change is absolutely frustrating. I’ve just checked a pie which I only created last week, now asks for minimum of 200 euro investment and that for a pie I wasn’t prepared to invest that amount on a regular basis.

But here is a work around it is a dirty one but it will work, if you have a pie with many positions then split it in multiple pies with less positions (approx 10 stocks per pie) that brings the minimum order down.

With all these recent changes here I have to rethink if it is worth while to continue to use this platform.

3 Likes
22

Just 400%? :slight_smile:

I don’t think ‘just’ belongs there.

Plus in absolute terms 5x is 500%. But 1€ from 0.2€ is indeed a 400% increase.

Also, I don’t see why you are trying to justify this increment anyhow, it certainly has hurt many retail investors here on T212, which are mind you, a majority here.

This change came without any warning whatsoever, and landed on Christmas.

I expect the team to address this properly and share the reasoning behind this change.

8 Likes
23

Can’t say I agree with this move at all. I don’t see how it benefits the user in any way,
There’s been a lot of changes recently that’s making more difficult to invest in the way this platform was originally intended.
Sad to see.

8 Likes
24

The most frustrating thing is that one of my pies has a large amount of stock in; say I want to invest 100 but I’m happy to not invest in all the companies on this occasion due to the minimum applicable purchase cost, I’ll have to buy stocks outside of it to import to get around it.

Or I’ll have to split my pie into 2, which will be equally if not more annoying.

2 Likes
25

We understand that some of you might find the £1 minimum limiting but there’s a very solid reason behind it - scalability.

The number of pies created by our clients is growing at a staggering pace and we’re very excited about that. But every trade has to be executed, cleared, reported, etc… so we have to define at least a basic limit.
While we understand that for some of you there is a case for a sub £1 orders, we think that it’s a very small trade-off which would allow our service to grow further and be stable. And remain free!

We are just getting started with AutoInvest and Pies so stay tuned for new exciting features.

16 Likes
26

Rising the minimum amount, probably will be bring less transactions and improve the platforms stability also, on T212 and IB side.

With some many orders (manual and Pies) pre-market, when the US opens, the probable outages issues starts to grow up, and even if that T212/IB don’t have an outage, the orders could be delayed or unable to cancel.

Bottom-line, could improve the T212 stability.

@noop, could this be a reason to the rising minimums?

27

Spot on! The order count is unprecedented. And it’s going to grow with the features we are planning to introduce.
Reliability is our top priority.

3 Likes
28

It’s the pains of growing up.

Trading 212 is victim of his own success.

I already saw that on other successful fintech marketplaces.

29

I can understand that being a developer myself. However I fail to understand why it was done like this: no prior warning whatsoever (the users noticed the change) and could have been done so as to impact only new pies. You have to realize you give a kid a toy, let him play with it and then take it away. Trading 212 really has a problem with communicating decisions. I don’t know what can be done about it.

10 Likes
30

I take your point.

That being said, surely it’s a fair compromise to be able to invest less than 200 under the custom mode? That’s the part I’m most frustrated with.

1 Like
31

You’ve to be kidding. I’m an engineer and this will not improve stability, unless the previous logic was somehow flawed or subpar! Fractionals are traded in-house as OTC, IB has nothing to do with them. And IB is a global company and it scales with its customers vertically and horizontally. T212 should be responsible for it’s own reliability. If there’s more traffic or orders, it has to be smart to route and handle them properly and efficiently, grow their infrastructure further as they have been. IB is not a bottleneck and neither are sub dollar orders.

Of course it’s nicer to have a uniform minimum value limit for fractional trades but it’s counterproductive.

So, NO, this will not help improve stability, at least not in the mid term, and not even in short term if more people adopt fractionals, which they will!

So, I call it a bluff.

2 Likes
32

@noop please address the following topic:

This needs priority after the sudden and unexpected changes that have taken place in the last weeks.

33

To be fair, where is the value of buying a share less than £1, just invest less regularly.

34

I personally think all of the recent developments have been just gimmicks. Sorry.
Get back to the core of trading and investing and stop the gamification of financial instruments.

If you want to be spread out - buy an ETF. If you want to manage a portfolio of researched stocks, then pick a handful and know them inside out and back to front.

Investing blocks of funds spread about like crazy for tiny amounts?
That just seems like a lot of work for nothing, to be honest.

Do what you want at the end of the day - but don’t moan when things don’t go your way either.

10 Likes
35

If you are thinking DCA and diversification are not the core of trading and investing, I’m sorry you don’t know what gamification of financial instrument looks like. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
36

I agree. This is probably the main point, customer expectations have been poorly managed and communications have not been very good.

Regarding investments, I understand that they might want to increase the minimum, but I think that minimum should have been 1 Euro/USD/GBP from the start and not 0.20 first and then increase it to 1 unexpectedly, with inmediate effects and no notification to customers.

I also understand that for many of you with large budgets, investing 0.20 weekly or monthly in a single stock may not seem worth it, but otherwise pies are not necessarily fully available for low-budget investors.

In addition, if you want to replicate the top 50 holdings of an ETF, tracking the EuroStoxx50, Ibex-35, CAC-40 or Dax-30, avoiding the fees (which is a big benefit of pies) then automatically the weighting of the smallest constituents (Rounded to 0.5% when smaller than this) leads to a minimum 200 GBP/USD/Euro pie investment schedule.

For Eurostoxx-50: 0.7%, leads to 142 GBP/Euro.

For Ibex-35, 0.18% (not possible, so triggers 0.5%): 200 GBP/Euro

For Dax-30, 0.7% as Eurostoxx-50, 142 GBP/Euro.

For Cac-40, 0.4% (not possible, so triggers 0.5%): 200 GBP/Euro

Obviously with 0.20 USD/Euro/GBP investments, these numbers were one fifth of what they are in this example.

I have not looked at the top 50 in the S&P 500 or FTSE-100, but I imagine that it will be similar.

5 Likes
37

Executing 1 million and 10 million orders(sample figures) daily (even otc) has quite an implication in clearance/storage and reporting. As a developer, I do hope you agree context, scaling and tradeoffs matter and you are making a shot in the dark with that statement.
Why do you think that no market accepts small orders in high count? Because it’s not justifiable.

You have a right to your opinion. But since we hold the responsibility - we have to make a judgement call.

7 Likes
38

Investing has become more of a “game” to some.
No offence but people should really reflect on what there doing

39

Thank you for the brilliant analysis, replicating indices without fees was one strategy with pies that seems to fail now for a lot of retail investors.

Most of us, including me, will have to reconstitute our pies and consolidate our pie investments to monthly investments, hence loosing on valuable compounding.

1 Like
40

Well said, ive thought about the same thing

1 Like