How free shares work
In August, free share offers have gone a little crazy so I thought it would be good to explain how these work in a little more depth.
You will have likely heard of the phrase "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and quite rightly I thought this about free share offers a year ago as well.
I started my investing journey in early 2020 through a platform called Nutmeg which offers fully managed services for a small fee. After hearing more about individual stocks, I wanted to open an investment account where I could buy particular stocks.
Upon lots of research, I found that the most popular options in the UK were Freetrade and Trading212 so naturally I downloaded their apps and started playing around.
I was really impressed with what I found and wanted to share these apps with my friends. At this point, I realised that if they downloaded them through a link that was given to me we would both get a free share.
Naturally, I was intrigued to see how this worked so I sent the link to a few friends and we all got some free shares. I must have made £10 in about 5 minutes and was gobsmacked how easy this was.
Nowadays, free share offers make up a huge part of the business model here at The Bank Engine and allow us to fund our operations and offer financial education for free.
So why do they exist?
In a nutshell, these new investment platforms want to lure you in to see what they have on offer. The best way to do this is to reward their customers (existing and new) and rather than splashing millions on ad campaigns, free shares are the way to do it!
If you don’t continue to use the app - oh well, they gave out some money with no result but typically this method of marketing works wonders and more importantly gets new people investing!
So how do they work?
All free share offers are slightly different, but here at The Bank Engine, we focus on the 4 most trustworthy offers available in the market at the moment.
The simple way;
Freetrade and Trading212 offer the simplest method of getting a free share and that is the ‘deposit and get’ offer.
You simply download the app through a referral link and deposit £2 and boom a free share appears that you can sell for cash.
Others are a little different; Stake you have to deposit $50 but incur a few fees so this is for those of you who are comfortable with trusting us and our instructions. We are currently offering cashback during August if you sign up for this through our link!
Orca carries a little risk where you have to pay out approx £4 to be eligible but if you are referring others this may be worthwhile.
Should you do them?
In short, yes. It is 100% free money and as long as you understand what you are doing and follow our instructions you should be able to get an extra bit of cash here and there!
Any questions?
Feel free to drop us any questions via DM on social media or by email
Useful links;
Freetrade - Instructions (UK only)
Trading212 - Instructions (EU only)