Matt Leibowitz (centre) and his Stake co-founders.
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Trading apps Stake and Freetrade surge 4x amid recent market volatility
“We’re living through a historic period of time and some people don’t just want to sit on the sidelines."
With the winners and losers of coronavirus beginning to emerge, it seems mobile trading apps are enjoying a huge boom in activity.
Freetrade described March to AltFi as an “insanely good” month from a customer and trading perspective, echoing App Annie’s report that trading apps had been the standout winner as the world was turned upside down last month.
“We've seen record account openings, with almost every day setting a new all-time record over the month,” said Freetrade’s chief marketing officer and co-founder Viktor Nebehaj.
On the 20 March, the Friday before PM Boris Johnson announced the UK lockdown and amid the lowest point of the market, Freetrade saw a 125 per cent jump in the number of accounts opened compared to the average of the previous weeks.
“We saw dramatic growth in trading volumes and we recorded the busiest days in our history,” added Nebehaj.
Meanwhile, Australian platform Stake, which launched in the UK this February, has seen a 4x increase in the number of trades on its platform since Christmas.
For March and April alone trading volumes were up 52 per cent versus January and February, with over $150m/month now being traded through the platform.
In particular, Stake has noted that the buy:sell ratio for many of the most popular US tech stocks (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla and Facebook) has been picking up steam, rising from below 2:1 (two buys for every one sell) to nearly 4:1 now.
During this period ETFs like the TVIX and UVXY, which are both tied to the CBOE Volatility Index, a popular measure of the stock market's expectation of volatility, have also broken into Stakes top 10 most bought and most sold stocks for the first time.
“We’re living through a historic period of time and some people don’t just want to sit on the sidelines,” said Stake CEO and founder Matt Leibowitz.
“They have opinions and beliefs and they want to make something of that.”
Revolut declined to provide AltFi figures for the performance of its stock trading service over the past month.
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