cold called by Avacade offering free pension review

They do not charge me just take a commission from any company i may wish to change over my pension to.

That isnt good. We are just 2 months away from commission being banned and most firms have moved to fee basis but you get these old dinosaurs taking commission. What is worse is that most modern pension contracts are not actually commission basis but fee basis. So, they are telling you porkies. There is no commission. Whatever they get paid is deducted from your pension fund.

I dont like being cold called so have tried researching and can find little info on them. Has anyone had dealings, good or bad, with this company?

No decent FSA regulated company cold calls. Most pension cold calls are actually scams. So, best avoid it.

In your case, you appear to have had one of these "potential" scams. There is no company called Avacade on the FSA regsiter. An internet search suggests it is one of these unregulated schemes which any normal person should avoid.

I have done my standard checks on such websites and as far as I can see this one does look OK - its a first!. Dates and registration details are consistent, there are full contact details which look genuine, the text hasnt been cobbled together from elsewhere etc etc.

On a technical point I would be interested to know why this isnt a Collective Investment Scheme. If it was such a scheme it would need to be registered with the FSA otherwise it would seem that it shouldnt be marketed to retail consumers. I couldnt find such a registration. See FSA website

As to whether it would be a good investment I have no idea. It certainly looks highly risky to me in that it would seem to be dependent on:
1) The global forestry market
2) The market in individual species
3) The economic/political/social stability of specific 3rd world countries.
4) The skills of individual local staff
5) Climatic conditions in specific geographic areas
6) The health of individual trees
etc etc

Were anything to go seriously wrong in any of these factors it would seem you could make large losses.

So if I were to go into this type of investment at all I would ensure that it only formed a very small part of my total portfolio.

Refering back to post #1 it says "Had a call from a company called Avacade offering free pension advice.".

The fact is that they are not authorised under UK legislation to give pension advice. Also, saying it is free is also wrong because you would pay for it within their unregulated investment scheme.

If a company cold calls you and says they can give free pension advice then you take that as them giving you free pension advice. Not then using a third party to give advice which will result in some form of payment being made to that person.

If they cold call saying they can get someone else to give advice then that is a different matter.

Also remember that many of the less honest schemes use unregulated introducers saying all sorts of dodgy stuff who then use a genuine firm to facilitate the movement into SIPP with no wrong doing done on that side of things (the recent case in the media found the regulated firm did no wrong but the introducer firm had).

It is quite possible that the unregulated investment side operates fine and is genuine and in this case, that side seems fine. It could just be a cold calling sales rep that is misrepresenting the way it is done.