Fund/ETF Investment Services

Financial Chat
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I currently have a fund/share account with Hargreaves Lansdown.

I thought it was a pretty good service as I have a chunk of money sat in various funds which do quite well.

The downside of that is they charge a 0.45% yearly platform fee - on top of whatever else is being charged by the fund managers.

I just wondered if anyone else had experience with any other platforms. I’m not interested in trading stocks or shares as I don’t have the experience, I’d rather choose a fund in an area I believe will perform well and let the fund managers pick the individual companies.

HL has zero fees for ETFs apart from the yearly 0.45% account charge. Despite the fee being high, they often offer a 0.5% discount on the fund manager costs which seems to even itself quite well considering the fees are about 1% on some of them anyway.

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Vanguard

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I thought about that but they only allow their own funds

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HL have £6 to £12 dealing fees for ETF trades.
There is no 0.45% fee for ETFs held in Fund & Share account. ETFs attract 0.45% fee if held within ISA (but capped at £45/year).

Within Fund and Share account the 0.45% fee applies to funds not traded on stock exchange (e.g. OEIC funds).

Are you only interested in funds that can be traded on stock market (e.g. ETFs) and not interested in OEIC funds (mutual funds)?

That will influence which platforms you can consider. If only interested in funds that are traded on stock exchange you could look at free/low-cost trading apps such as Freetrade and Trading212. But these don’t give access to OEIC funds.

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That’s correct

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I have HL and AJ Bell but those are rarely used now.

I also have a Freetrade and T212 account. Forget Freetrade is poor in comparison.

T212 has a huge selection of ETFs, no fee to buy/sell, the spread is raw in Invest/ISA and there is no monthly/yearly fee. You can do limit and stop losses, and shows the best ask/bid, decent charts etc

If anyone wants a referral to T212 (free share worth up to £100) send me a PM. :wink:

If anyone wants me to do a search for any stocks/ETFs to see if it’s on there let me know.

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Yes, but they’re pretty good funds and are really cheap. The underlying assets will likely be the same as funds elsewhere by a different name, particularly one that tracks an index.

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To be fair to them a DDos attack and being affected by Interactive Brokers API connection is incredibly rare which mainly affected day traders.

The OP appears to be a long term and most people wouldn’t have noticed.

If you’ve recently joined in the last week or so then you might think that happens all the time, but the other 10 months of this year it’s been perfectly fine. I use it almost every day.

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That is one main issue of piggy backing on Interactive Brokers, all they can do is shout at them if an issue occurs. IB is a major player so it would have affected more than just T212 around the World. As I said it’s incredibly rare but they do face issues now with having 800,000 users and US open times.

What was in the terms you didn’t like out of interest?

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I have about 30k in non-exchange traded funds with HL.

So it seems I’m looking for something similar that’s not ETFs, I have funds in FSSA, HSBC and UBS funds currently.

Have to admit I had to look up the terminology. Trading212 I’d avoid just because of the feeling they give off, same with Freetrade. I just don’t trust them. I thought HL was fairly reputable but they’re just significantly more expensive than the rest.

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@TTJJ, on rep/reliability concerns wrt to Freetrade, they are still very much a start up, but I take comfort from the fact their management is very experienced, they are fully UK domiciled and regulated (rather than EU passported from a less stringent regulatory jurisdiction) and are a member firm on the London Stock Exchange.

That, and broader mission is aligned to what I call ‘doing the right thing’, by committing to driving financial inclusion in a transparent and open way.

You have nothing to lose by opening an account and seeing how their service stacks up. They have a fairly friendly community forum where you can ask questions and get a view on what other clients think about their service.

Full disclosure: I invested directly in their business several years ago.

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I’ve got £ in HL and FreeTrade. Both good companies with good products.

I wouldn’t touch T212. I signed up to try it and they were trying to get me to sign up to CFD trading in app - not for me.

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There are three types of accounts CFD, Invest, ISA. You tick which you need, but you can open any at a later point. I didn’t see a hard sell for CFD it just listed them with check boxes from memory, might have changed since.

I have Freetrade but I wouldn’t now recommend it. It does the job for the very casual retail investor. If you don’t care about seeing the spread, or charts it’s fine. I think paywalling stocks and charging a tenner just to be able to place limit and stops is silly, but if you don’t need them again it’s fine as a platform.

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T212 survives from its CFD margins. FT doesn’t cross subsidise. Stop expecting everything to be free - they’ve got to make money. FT I’d a great app end platform, and I didn’t like the T212 app.

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17

Limits and stops are pretty basic standard features to be locking under a fee is my point. And it’s highly controversial locking access to stocks behind a paywall. If the Freetrade Plus was a new set of advanced features sure. I’m not against charging if it brings something to the table.

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I don’t understand why there’s an expectation of a free trading service with limits and stops - when until very recently no-one provided this for free. Historically brokers and banks have charged per trade often not unsubstantial fees. Companies need to be sustainable as to build a good platform costs money.

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The expectation is there when other free platforms have had the ability to place limit and stops for years. I don’t know any other platform where they are putting it behind a fee as a feature. It’s just a lazy way to stick a price tag on it.

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FT never offered stops and limits previously - they’ve only offered them under plus so I don’t get the issue.

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21

I’m not sure how else to say it without repeating, the expectation was that all users would get limits and stops to match other free platforms that already offer it. Just because it’s new to Freetrade doesn’t mean shove that under paid.

It’s like Monzo and credit reporting that should have been free, and then at the last minute clawing it back under Plus. It offers nothing more than what you get using the free credit karma. And again I appreciate it takes dev time and money to build but the fact is no one should be giving money over to look at a credit report.of data collected on themselves.

The limit and stops are basic features and expected, not exactly advanced, unique or innovative features that warrant being paywalled for a tenner.

Hence why there was a lot of customers in the Freetrade forum pissed at that, and also the fact that stocks were being put behind a paywall which again is pretty crappy way of creating a paid service rather than actually building say a new advanced set of tools or something worth £120 a year that builds on the core free platform.

When you have other free platforms offering limits and stops that just leaves the paywalled stocks as their “feature”.

And again taking T212 as an example that has just shy of 10,000 stocks (and soon every single stock from each exchange), you have on one hand a limited set of stocks, paying a tenner for a bit more, and on the hand access to everything.

I personally think it’s incredibly crappy paywalling access to stocks. As I said it’s such a lazy way to put a price tag on the service.

It’s like a supermarket saying you can have our own brand beans for free, or pay a tenner to get into the aisle where you can then buy Heinz or Branstons.

You then walk into any other supermarket and they have all the beans in the same aisle as you would expect. Hopefully that analogy describes the expectation. If you’ve only ever shopped in that supermarket that paywalls the beans then you might think it’s normal, or if you only eat the own brand, then again, no impact. In the same way if you’ve never known that limit or stops exist it might seen reasonable to put it behind paying.

I accept you @katvoira and @CTE think otherwise.

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Did Freetrade ever say this? I’m not sure they did, happy to be corrected though.

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