Selling fractional shares?

elwy

I'm rebalancing my S&S portfolio and I have a newb question, since I've never tried to sell anything before!


I have a fund with 1486.84332 units that I want to close down. When I try to sell this fractional number of units I get a very unhelpful message to the effect of "Unfortunately there is an error, please try again later!"


So anyway, I now realise that I can't sell fractional units and I have to enter a whole number 1486, right?


What will happen to the remaining fraction? Will it get sold automatically or will it be littering my portfolio for ever more? The platform is TD Direct, in case it matters.


Thanks for any help.

bowlhead99

I don't think it would get sold automatically. I use TD but have very few funds with them. I have a fund or two which I mostly exited but kept a few units (or maybe even fractions of units) in them as a kind of 'watch list' - as there are no fees to buy or sell anyway. I've done this on other platforms too, e.g. youinvest / sippdeal. They shouldn't interpret a request to sell 1 of your 1.84 units as a request to sell everything, you can keep the scraps on your account if you like.

But if you don't like, and you want to sell, just call them up and ask them what to do. Perhaps it isn't the fractional units that's the problem, perhaps it's just an old fund that is no longer routinely tradeable in that particular class which is giving you the error message.

Just a thought, but with funds - where you don't use stop or limit orders because they are always future priced - you don't have to sell specific numbers of units. If you have £1000 worth of of a particular fund, can't you just request that they sell £1500 worth and then they will sell as many shares as they need to, to try to raise that amount of cash from that holding - in other words, all of them?

elwy

I'd rather get rid of the fund completely. It's an inclusive index tracker fund from 4 yrs ago which I've realised is nearly three times as expensive as the cheapest unbundled version now available, so I wouldn't gain anything from watching it.


Can anyone confirm if there is a trick to selling the whole lot? I'm a bit scared to place a sell order for more than it's worth in case it messes anything up!

bowlhead99

As mentioned, perhaps the fact it is an old (rather than currently-offered) version could well be the reason why it was showing an error when you tried to sell your units.

I still think the most sensible thing to do is to phone their customer services people who will actually have (or actually be able to find out) the answer and potentially even do the trade for you if it won't go through online. You could always send an email query if you were willing to wait a bit longer for a response.

Meanwhile if you are concerned about being in the index when you don't want to be there any more, presumably you can just sell the first simply 1486.00 units and get out of the market rather than taking unnecessary further exposure while you wait for the answer.

elwy

Yes that's what I've done now. I successfully placed a partial sell order so I think the error message was due to fractional units rather than a dodgy old fund.

I'll phone them tomorrow to ask, unless anybody can confirm how to exit the fund completely.

Vortigern

Rather than specify the number of units, or a value to be sold, can't you just specify a percentage of your holding to be sold? In which case you sell 100%

This is certainly possible with some of the platforms.

elwy

Ah no, TD Direct only allows me to specify units or sterling.

Vortigern

elwy wrote: »

I have a fund with 1486.84332 units that I want to close down.

What is 0.84332 units worth? Is it worth the hassle?

Is it possible that you don't have 1486.84332 units? Perhaps you have only 1486.843315 units. It would round up to give the figure you see, but you can't sell the 0.000005 units that you don't own.

I hope TD Direct can sort it out for you.

elwy

It doesn't bother me in terms of what it's worth but I'd prefer to keep my portfolio tidy. Unfortunately I get rather easily confused and I know if it's left in a mess then I'll be fretting over it in a year or two when I've forgotten why it was left like that!


So anyway, I tried emailing the question to TD Direct and haven't received a reply yet. Today I needed to phone them due to other problems and they told me that it's best to close funds over the phone with them. In other words, it's not possible to exit funds completely using the TD Direct online tool.


Incidentally, the other problem I had was when I tried to buy new funds through their Trading:Place an Order page. I thought this was the logical place to make a buy order. It turns out that they don't keep the list of funds up to date on the Buy page so some funds only offer the old inclusive instead of clean versions. Instead I should only buy funds through their new Fund Selector tool in the Research section. I can't help but think that they should make this clear and not offer a list of funds on the Buy page if I'm not supposed to buy them there.

Radiantsoul

I have 0.00006 of LEGAL & GENERAL UT GBL EMG MKTS IND I GBP ACC on TD Direct. I cannot remove it, and nor can I be bothered to call them to get it removed.