Hargreaves Lansdown for day trade share dealing - Anyone use them?

fiscoking

Hi,

Just trying out the H&L web portal for *day trade* share dealing & I've noticed two fairly large 'issues'.

1. The 'real time' price charting actually isn't ... real time. It's delayed by 15 minutes at least on the charting even with real time enabled. The displayed buy\sell price might be, but the charting isn't. I've checked that the time on my computer is accurate to a few seconds. See the image below. The chart marker is as far right as it will go. Data interval set to 1 minute.

https://images2.imgbox.com/92/99/wnLWx6Aj_o.jpg

The 'real time' option also disappears once you've been logged out.

2. The website logs you out every 5 minutes or so, unless you refresh the page you're on. Opening a new browser tab and navigating on that doesn't keep the other tabs 'alive'. That's an issue if you need to watch a live share price beyond the 5 minute mark. There's no option (that I can see) to alter the timeout.

I'm using a modern version of Chrome so this should work.

The above two issues are show stoppers, not to mention that every time you log back in, you have to fill out 4 fields of security info, and retrieve the text code from your mobile. I've logged in about 6 times today already.

Anyone else see this, or know of a way around the above?

H&L has been recommended by a few friends, but they don't day trade. More like the odd trade or fund switch every now and then. Also noticed long waits on the telephone for support.

Thanks.

Another_Saver

Why do you want to day trade?
Why do you want to day trade on the most expensive platform for day trading?

ColdIron

fiscoking said:

2. The website logs you out every 5 minutes or so, unless you refresh the page you're on. Opening a new browser tab and navigating on that doesn't keep the other tabs 'alive'. That's an issue if you need to watch a live share price beyond the 5 minute mark. There's no option (that I can see) to alter the timeout.

Account Settings - Password and Timeout Settings

HL aren't cheap for trading, but maybe £5.95 if you trade more than 20 times a month is acceptable to you

bowlhead99

fiscoking said:

Hi,

Just trying out the H&L web portal for *day trade* share dealing & I've noticed two fairly large 'issues'.

H&L has been recommended by a few friends, but they don't day trade. More like the odd trade or fund switch every now and then. 

HL don't advertise themselves as being any good for would-be 'day traders'. Anyone with an intention of making serious money from day trading would be buying on margin, using high performance low latency connection, real time news and data feed including level 2 order book data. Nobody is recommending HL to you as a platform for daytrading.

1. The 'real time' price charting actually isn't ... real time. It's delayed by 15 minutes at least on the charting even with real time enabled. The displayed buy\sell price might be, but the charting isn't. I've checked that the time on my computer is accurate to a few seconds. See the image below. The chart marker is as far right as it will go. Data interval set to 1 minute.
https://images2.imgbox.com/92/99/wnLWx6Aj_o.jpg
The 'real time' option also disappears once you've been logged out.

It's a chart of a real live market (rather than a closed market or yesterday's market) with the ticks set at one minute intervals, but data is subject to a 15min delay just like the free data you get from the London Stock Exchange website. They only aim to offer live pricing for 'most' companies on the UK market and you are not looking at a UK company, but an irish domiciled ETF product. 

If you want to know what price you would get to buy or sell, you can do an order to be given a real price quote for the quantity / amount you want to trade, that you can accept or reject within the provided time limit.  This is how most mainstream consumer investment platforms work.

You can get usually get live price charts for free off Google Finance (they have deep pockets and can afford to give it away) or a variety of third party data providers.

2. The website logs you out every 5 minutes or so, unless you refresh the page you're on. Opening a new browser tab and navigating on that doesn't keep the other tabs 'alive'. That's an issue if you need to watch a live share price beyond the 5 minute mark. There's no option (that I can see) to alter the timeout.

If you wanted to keep watching the page, and it is going to time you out unless you refresh the page, can't you just refresh the page? Regardless, if the data is on a rolling delay anyway it doesn't seem like you're missing much if you go away to a different page and come back.

 Also noticed long waits on the telephone for support.

HL is a pretty simple mass market option for buying and holding long term investments. There is not much to go wrong and therefore most users won't need much support. The ones that do because they don't understand much about investments or are trying to do something one-off and complex (like take a pension distribution but wanting to understand how it works) will spend quite a bit of time with customer service staff holding their hand through the process. You could imagine with that sort of service model and national lockdowns and call-centres not all being 'essential', that could cause it to take a while before someone picks up.

Somewhere like IG.com is going to be a much better place to go daytrading, whether spreadbets or CFDs.

Bravepants

Day trading means trading in real-time. Whatever platform you use needs to be as competitive as the platforms used by the AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven trading algorithms running on fast computers timed by atomic clocks to time trades within better than micro-second (0.000001 second) accuracy. So no HL is not appropriate and neither is the £5.95 cost per trade (£11.99 for fewer than 20 trades per month). In the late 90s a nephew of my wife's got his parents to install ISDN (the superfast broadband of the day at 64kbps ... whooosh!) in their house just so that he could day trade. They thought he was going to bring in the money!...how wrong they were and what a terrible waste of money!

fiscoking

Some good replies here; thank you.

>Why do you want to day trade?<
Just wanted the option to try it.

>Why do you want to day trade on the most expensive platform for day trading?<
I already have an account with H&L. They don't say you can't use their site for day trading. With all marketing, the devil is in the part they're *not* telling you, but wanted to check it out for myself.

>Account Settings - Password and Timeout Settings<
Doesn't work for me. The setting cannot be changed. This could be because I've subscribed to other 'services' from H&L.
https://images2.imgbox.com/b1/6c/4E6HN8fj_o.jpg

 

>HL don't advertise themselves as being any good for would-be 'day traders'. Anyone with an intention of making serious money from day trading would be buying on margin, using high performance low latency connection, real time news and data feed including level 2 order book data. Nobody is recommending HL to you as a platform for daytrading.<

That's becoming evident now but it wasn't before I posted, thanks.

 

>If you wanted to keep watching the page, and it is going to time you out unless you refresh the page, can't you just refresh the page?<

Refresh every 5 minutes? All day long? Manually? Show some mercy please! I could if I was desperate. I'd rather use another platform.

 

>HL is a pretty simple mass market option for buying and holding long term investments.<

I'm reaching the same conclusion.

 

>They thought he was going to bring in the money!...how wrong they were and what a terrible waste of money!<

Yes, history is littered with people who started out with the best intentions and lost a great deal. The stock market has laid waste to many. So long as you only put up what you can afford to lose, and learn something along the way I don't see a problem.

As for my original question on the topic of day trading via H&L, I think the answer is; not really.

Regards.

ColdIron

fiscoking said:

>Account Settings - Password and Timeout Settings<

Doesn't work for me. The setting cannot be changed. This could be because I've subscribed to other 'services' from H&L.
https://images2.imgbox.com/b1/6c/4E6HN8fj_o.jpg

That's right, if you have an Active Savings account you can't change the timeout, but there are Tab Refresh add-ons for some browsers

Thrugelmir

 Day trading is little more than a roulette wheel. What do you know that thousands of others don't? 

EdGasketTheSecond

If you want to day trade, try IG Index, CMC Markets, and Plus500