Investment Update- How My Shares With FreeTrade Are Doing

Investment apps have become more popular over the past few years. I’ve tried a few of them but Freetrade is the only one I have physical investments with. Despite knowing that investing is the best way to build longer-term profit I am still very risk-averse. And until a few years ago investing was outside of my comfort zone and I wouldn’t have needed to do an investment update.

I am still risk-averse now but I have my workplace pension, a Stocks & Shares ISA and some individual shares with Freetrade.

What is Freetrade?

Freetrade is an easy-to-use investing account that is free to use (unless you open a Stocks & Shares ISA at £3 a month, or a Freetrade Plus account at £9.99 a month).

You can buy both US and UK stocks on the app, and ETFs. And you can look at how well particular stocks and portfolios have done before buying a share. You can add stocks to your watchlist so you can keep an eye on them before making a purchase.

And the whole app is super simple, you add money to your account, and you can buy shares (during trading hours). And you can sell at any point (again during trading hours).

They are FCA registered so your money is protected by FSCS. The only risk you have is the standard risk with investments going both up and down.

How I use Freetrade

As you can see from my investment value above I don’t own or buy a lot of shares. And most of these shares were purchased around two years ago and I just left them in the app to see what happened.

When I do the specific investment update below I can give an idea about how much each has gone up or down. But unsurprisingly most have gone down.

I do want to start buying some more shares again, but I will only do this with excess money that I can afford to lose.

Investment update- types of shares I have

As you can see from above the prices of shares can vary massively, but I have two distinctly different types of shares.

I have two shares in the FTSE100 which is unsurprisingly one of the only shares to have gone up in value. The FTSE100 is an index consisting of the 100 biggest companies by market capitalisation on the London Stock Exchange. So when you buy a share in them it’s a combination of all 100 companies. The great thing about this is if a few of them drop massively, chances are there will be enough that go up to level things out. So it’s fundamentally a less risky share. This is an area I want to buy more shares in as I feel there’s more scope for growth.

Investment update on specific shares

Then for the rest of the shares, I went against my own advice and chose some emotional shares with companies I love. Thankfully I didn’t spend a lot of money, but let’s drill down into what I have.

I have 1 and a bit of Peloton shares that I bought when the shares were pretty high during the pandemic, and of course, since demand has come down the shares have dropped back down.

I have six shares in M&S just because it’s a staple high-street brand I love and ass you can see they’re super cheap. They have gone up in value a little since I bought them, but in reality, they’re so cheap it wouldn’t make all that difference.

The Grainger share is one of the free shares that I kept hold of so there’s no story behind this one.

Dr. Martens is another of those brands I love and I just wanted a share in it. These ones have gone down quite a bit and I don’t specifically know the reason for this. But if I keep a hold of it for long enough hopefully it will go back up.

Then my final five shares are for Cineworld which are under one penny each. It comes as no surprise that these have gone down by 99% because they’ve gone through bankruptcy and waiting to see if they’ll be bought out. But again because they were so cheap when I bought them I’ve not lost a lot.

Have you bought any shares? How are they performing?

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