[Closed] hargreaves lansdown regular saver Rant

I work for another investment company and trades aren't possible while there's one pending. Dunno why (I'm in IT rather than investment side of things).  If it's been pending for a while, there may have been an issue along the journey - it's not as simple as you submit, HL do it. All manner of links in that chain.

thanks @jimmy,
they are showing as pending, but with the date 10th Dec Order Date, so they must have submitted them early.

yeah i guess the IT chain is complicated, in effect the transaction will select the market maker with whom to transact after it has checked you have the cash or stock holding in place.

i use to work as an execution only dealer back during the internet bubble. i can understand why the apps break on big days with the Demand, like it has from time to time over the past few months.

back in 2000 we only had 2 trading systems, majority of smaller stock or bigger orders was all done over the phone.

Oooh. I may have it...
I had a very similar issue, though not quite the same, and it was because I had a purchase ( or indeed sale ) pending that was defined in pounds rather than number of shares. Really annoyed me for ages until I realised that it was blocking the transaction due to uncertainty ( theoretical uncertainty) about how much the pending transaction was actually about to cost.

My explanation above is shit. But anyway, try it.

So for example I had 5000 Rolls Royce shares,and put in a limit order to sell £1000 of them if the breached 150p per share. I knew that would have not sell 660 of them, but since the sale was defined in pounds ajbell would reserve the whole lot in case it needed it to facilitate my commitment.
I'm still not making sense am I?

I’m still not making sense am I?

🤔Errrmmmm...😉

i've another rant - if you use a LISA you can choose which funds your regular payments go into (makes sense) but you cant choose which funds your 'bonus' (25%) goes into - you have to log in each month on whatever date and set it manually. Hopeless.

@thegeneralist i think i got ya, so my regular saver is ££ value,
but if i choose to buy XX number of shares it may work rather than ££ value which i normally do,
will try it tomorrow..

i can understand the reason for non liquid stocks like AIM or were the systems only allow small volumes to be traded, which have trade sizes attached, but I'm buying/selling liquid ftse100 so transaction size is irrelevant.

Not an expert in this, but I think there are rules regarding the % of shares in a given company that any individual can hold without notifying somebody? A way to get round that could be to place multiple simultaneous orders. I can also see why, if you were selling, they might not want another sell order until the first was completed, as you might not have enough left - but I can't see why that would affect buying..

had a purchase ( or indeed sale ) pending that was defined in pounds rather than number of shares

Yep - you're not buying units, you're buying a price - that position can change when the trade is placed. If it's done as a batch job, it might not get done that day, or even week.

yeah I guess the IT chain is complicated

Don't assume it's automated! It could have real people placing the trades.

@greybeard these are regular saver amounts, if an individual was buying XX% of a companies shares they wouldn’t be investing via this method.

If I have 500 shares in Lloyds and a regular saver buying £100 a month , I don’t see why I cant sell my 500 shares, because I have a buy order pending
On that same share. They are in hand.

@rickon I meant a regular trade rather than these regular monthly saver ones, agreed I don’t think the regular saver will be automated , transaction are placed throughout the day, they are essentially combining trades and splitting the shares and monies paid out .. they can’t exactly place one order per stock (ie all regular savers monies on that stock) as it would be vastly over normal market size ..

Yes, I realise regular saver trades wouldn't be used like that, but if there's a rule in the computer that says you can't have two pending trades, it might not recognise that difference.

Blocking sells of settled stock in this case sounds like fair cause for complaint and compensation. They are your assets and therefore should be yours to sell.

On an RSP with £ based orders it makes sense until time of order execution that you cannot sell, but once that order has been executed (for HL preferably as a bulk order, order may be over NMS but will be manually worked on dealers side and possibly multiple market traded to full, that will then be aggregated and cost per share over whole order calculated) and you are assigned X shares there is nothing theoretically stopping you instructing a sale of those shares too. In reality HL might block the sale until settled but again I see no reason why you cannot sell other already settled stock - i fully expect not all firms in this space will do this.

I work for another firm in the same area and will check what they do. I believe however they will permit your settled stock to be sold reagrdless of RSP and once an order has been executed you can sell instantly without waiting for settlement - interesting to confirm if this is the same on RSPs. Would also be interesting if you raise it with HL what their reasoning is.

@boombang I’m still waiting on a reply to a duplicate sale I made on that mad Tuesday early November.

The system was struggling and it managed to sell twice.
The next day I bought back the shares at a loss, so was £100 down. Later that week I got a message saying system issues we will correct the duplicate. I messaged to say I’d bought back, can you refund loss.

They removed the sell and buyback :0)
That’s good customer service shame they never message to confirm

That is fair treatment if the fault was not your own (i.e. sell did not appear to occur when instructed and you still could see the asset to sell). Good to hear they did that.

Not an expert in this, but I think there are rules regarding the % of shares in a given company that any individual can hold without notifying somebody?

No one on HL will be anywhere near those thresholds!

I am an H&L user through Vantage.
To buy sell shares my trading section lets me set the trade as buy or sell by amount or cost then if it is in trading hours I have so many seconds to accept or decline the price offered.

Funds take longer typically if I place a trade in the evening that gets picked up the next day and can take up to two days to execute. I have never experienced any limits on the number of buy/sell orders but I have had occasion to moan at H&L over the time taken to execute an order involving funds. They did explain about grouping orders. Not an apologist for H&L but they are dealing with very high volumes of trading in a pandemic in a tier three city.

It might be worth exploring getting into Vantage if not already there.

Yes funds seem to take ages (days) whereas share trades are pretty much instant.