How to buy stocks and shares for free

As well as sharing his marketing expertise, our founder Dan regular writes about hobby-investing, personal finance and entrepreneurship. This article looks at one of Dan’s favourite investing apps. Disclaimer: Always seek professional financial advice before investing. Dan does not provide financial advice.

Looking for a free share? Use our promo code at the bottom of this article!

Around 2015 I stumbled across an American company called Robinhood. I was drawn to them for two main reasons. Firstly; their website was awesome. It was an early example of the modern trends we take for granted now. A clean UI, lots of whitespace, full-screen background video and large eye-catching text and images. It was such a good website I used it as an example in many of my pitches and design meetings with my clients. Their site has of course changed now, but its still excellent.

Secondly; Robinhood was the first company I’d found that allowed me to buy and sell stocks and shares for free. Wow! Until then, I’d have to put an order in through my online banking system (or similar platforms) at around £12.95 per trade. This meant that if I only had, say, £100 to invest, then nearly 13% of my investment was lost to fees! Little-and-often investing was off-limits before Robinhood came along.

Unfortunately for me though, Robinhood was only open to American customers, so it would be a few more years before the wonderful “Freetrade” app arrived.

What is Freetrade?

Freetrade is a beautiful, simple stocks and shares trading app. There are no fees for basic investing.

How do they offer FREE trading?

It’s all explained in this article but I’ll summarise.

If you want to buy and sell for free, your orders are bundled together with lots of other investors and executed all at once (usually at 4pm). This way, Freetrade saves on their costs.

The company makes money from those investors who don’t want to wait until 4pm. Instant orders cost £1 per trade. Furthermore, Freetrade will soon be charging a £3 per month fee if you want an ISA. All very reasonable if you ask me!

Is it any good?

I’m all about little-and-often investing. It’s much more fun and less stressful to put a small amount of my spare cash each month into these sorts of things than to wait and invest a big chunk of change. So to that end, Freetrade really suits me.

I also really like the app design. Again, it is clean and uncluttered. Everything is obvious. There are some improvements I’d like to see (such as more stats on how well my portfolio is doing as a whole relative to what I have paid into the app), but the team at Freetrade are constantly updating things.

Get a free share!

If you are thinking about getting into small-scale stocks and shares investing, then definitely take a look at Freetrade. I think its great. If you do, you can use my ‘friend’ code and we both get a free share just for signing up. You don’t need to purchase any stocks to get the share either.

Sign up using this link to get a free share!

Happy investing 🙂

About the author

Dan Wiseman

Founder & director of Web Wise. He writes about web design, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing and games. Dan regularly speaks on these subjects and is available for coaching and consultancy.

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