When purchasing shares on T212 i do not get anywhere near the best price i can get on Interactive Investor or Hargreaves Lansdown etc. Why doesnt T212 provide a live quote facility so you know what price your getting the shares for.
Let me give an example, this morning i wanted ot buy TR Property Investment trust. I went on to my Interactive Investor account and did a dummy quote and was offered 3.1725 to puchase. T212 does not give live quotes (why? ) so when i did a manual trade i get 318p. Some will say do a limit order but more often than not you miss out on the limit order going through becuase the market makers doent offer the same price via T212 as they dovia the bigger platforms.
I dont understand two things
If T212 uses interactive brokers one of the largest brokers in the world why cant i get near as good prices as the other platforms
Why dont T212 provide a live quote like other platforms do?
Hi, I am also a user like you so asking a question for information; hope you donāt mind.
How do you define a live quote?
When you click on the BUY button of a stock , T212 provides a price on top which is live (if you keep the window without doing anything, you will notice the price changes real-time).
when i press buy you get presented with a window where you can put the number of shares you want. The price of the stock is updated in real time but seems to be the sell price , not the buy price, after pressing review order or quote with other platforms, you will be given a live price which then you can press execute. T212 doesnt have this, when you press review order there is no confirmation of the price you will get. You just get whatever price the system gives you. You can compare this yourself with the other platforms, its easy.
youāll get better quotes even in IBKR,
big brokers like HL and II has access to floor orders and has mutual bilateral contracts with several market makers and ECNs.
As far as I can tell all orders on T212 arrives āat the venueā as āmakersā and āfill or killsā and if not fiiled goes to OTC to get filled, which is almost always the worst price.
anything that is displayed as real time quote is an estimation and may not be availble during execution. If you have access to āLevel 2 dataā you will see that there are buy and sell orders waiting to be executed on both sides of the trade and there is a gap between them. Some brokers can freeze a transaction(also the offer in the background) for a very limited time (10-15 seconds) and show you the real price that the trade will execute on. Youāll then need to decide to buy/sell in that timeframe or the offer is lost.
apologies for all the bunny quotes in the post
also I have to add a disclaimer, I got no access to how execution works in T212 everything above is all my speculation and very well can be BS
a live quote is where you get offered an actual execution price and have a few seconds to accept it. You know exactly what price you will be given
Even without a live quote it is normally to be given the current actual market buy or sell price whereas on T212 you have no idea whether the displayed price is the buy, sell or some other price
@kali@WakeMeUp thanks for explaining the āLive Priceā. Until your definitions kicked off my memory, I always though what T212 shows on the sell and buy windows was the live price (it changed with time).
Now I remember when I used to have S&S account with a bank, the BUY window used to have a 15 sec count down timer built into the BUY button. with a dotted fence around the button. Unless you clicked on it within those 15 secs, the quoted price used to change and the counter would restart.
@RajK I agree with you, T212 does not seem to show live price (or hold the price for you for the 15 sec period for an assured transaction price.
I donāt have access to the Level-2 data or to any other live platform so will be interested to know how much price difference we encounter with each T212 trade compared to the live price.
I have to say that on a few occasions when I had put in a limit order for a stock ( at say 150p)I, had got the stock at 494p. So it is not always a bad price. But that also tells me now that even with a limit order, I may be entering the trade blind.
there are actually lots of issues involved in this.
A massive positive for T212 is that on some stock there is extended hours trading which I think is brilliant. I think on some issues, T212 is way ahead of other platforms.
For a very liquid stock the difference between T212 and having live quotes or better market access (off-book or via market makers) is usually negligible. Thus for something like NVDA the execution price is essentially the same but for ISA accounts the massive benefit of T212 is the low fx fees compared to many other firms. Thus it is annoying not knowing what the real trade price is but having a low fx greatly outweighs that for non UK stock (if your consider a UK ISA).
There can be all sorts of issues for UK small cap especially on SETsqx (AIM market). Other platforms may place orders via market makers or off-book and give a MUCH narrower spread and immediate execution. Orders on T212 generally go through the auctions and Iāve had orders take more than 24 hours to execute (for relatively small amounts).
There is a big issue sometimes with stock that has a large spread because its often possible to get a much better price within the market bid/offer spread elsewhere. However, again a big plus for T212 is the number of markets supported and the number of stock thatās available. Thus I may be able to get much better prices elsewhere but a particular stock might not be available on another platform.
I almost always use limit orders on T212 to avoid the problems with displayed price. Also limit orders are suited to my style of trading/investing. Sometimes I will not get execution but it often allows me to get a slightly better price than just using a market order. The problem comes that when a limit order doesnāt execute I donāt know whether its because the price wasnāt met, whether its just in the auctions (eg AIM company) and the auctions donāt have the liquidity or the spread. Also it means I often have to look elsewhere to see what the current bid/offer is to decide on what price to put in the limit order. Thus not great
Iām a user but this discussion has been had before.
212 offer us DMA, which means Direct Market Access trading. They do not take any PFOF, as this is illegal or add any extra charges other than the 0.15% FX fee.
For highly liquid stocks, we should see next to no difference to more traditional brokers.
For illiquid stocks, then we need to wait for liquidity on the exchange. This is where more traditional / more expensive brokers also reach out to market makers, who will make you an offer, in return for a āfeeā. On illiquid stocks, if you are a buyer and they can match you with a seller, you might get a better bid/ask spread.
212 can correct me if wrong but hope this helps explain. 212 are not setting prices, and if you are concerned with the on exchange prices, set a limit order.
What would also be useful to highlight to other users, is to show what HL etc as you have suggested, were quoting around the time a trade was executed on 212. Itās a lot easier for users to understand what you are saying and understand the difference. There will also be a difference in terms of fees. Have you factored in the HL trading and FX fees to your orders?
I know it is LTP but despite the name āLast Traded Priceā it isnāt necessarily the last traded price and can be very old.
It doesnāt reflect lots of trades in the market even on liquid stock - eg off-book or some market maker trades. Also for stock that goes through auctions it isnāt necessarily the last traded price and there can be many trades that donāt move the price. I have also seen numerous posts commenting that the price displayed hasnāt updated even when there are published trades through the market. Thus I very carefully used my words - it could be the buy price, it could be the sell price or it could be some other price (ie an old price)
On a separate note about price updates, I have had this experience multiple times where a price does not seem to update for a while ( too long to be normal) until I refresh the browser and this initiates price updates in multiple clicks.
Initially I thought this was probably an issue on my end but have since realised that there is probably some kind of timeout somewhere in the code which may be stopping the price updates until the browser is refreshed which brings the page quickly back to its current state (price and chart details).
do check if this is happening to you when you donāt see prices getting updated.
