Sometimes an order placed on Pearler may cause your account to become overdrawn. We'll explain how this can happen.

When Pearler places an order, it consists of two key steps:

• Pearler looks at the current live market price and the $ amount of shares you want and calculates the quantity of shares to purchase. This calculation is done such that if the order were to be placed at that price, you would have sufficient balance.

• Pearler sends this request off to our broker partner, OpenMarkets, to be placed on the market. Because this request is sent over a network, there is a slight delay (e.g. 1 second) between Pearler making the decision and the order being placed.

Because of the slight delay, occasionally we see the share market move very slightly (often by tiny amounts like 0.1%). If the value of the share goes up, then when the intended quantity is purchased it costs slightly more.

For example, if you tried to buy $900 units of VAS, Pearler would calculate the quantity by seeing that VAS is currently on the market for $89.80. Pearler would then decide to buy 10 units which would cost $898.00 (with $2 left over). However, if, during that 1-second window, the price of VAS moved to $90.10 (a movement up of 0.3%) the order would process and cost $901.00. If all you had in your account was $900, then you would be $1 overdrawn.

After 5 days of an account being overdrawn, if you have yet to make a deposit to meet this gap, we automatically collect funds from your bank account to cover the difference.

This is a technology obscurity that is specific to how Pearler and OpenMarkets have set up their infrastructure and is an ongoing topic between both parties to find a different approach.

If you wish to avoid any risk of this happening, we recommend you place limit orders on the platform instead of market orders.