Boast / weep about your recent investment decisions HERE

I put £500 in to a s&s a week ago, today I'm worth £511.46, mainly weighted to vanguard ftse although US opps has returned more.

Who wants to touch me? I SAID WHO WANTS TO TOUCH ME?

darkidoe wrote: »

Can I ask which platform do u use? Do u use the regular dealing to over a period of time and cancel it or are you able to set it up for a single deal and cancel it before the second month?

Grey gym sock and I both use Youinvest. On their 'regular investments' screen you can decide what investments you want to buy monthly on their 'bulk buy' discounted fee on the 10th of every month. You can change this as often as you like, they just look at it before the start of business on the 10th and book your trades if you have the available funds.

If you don't have the available funds it will fail and try again the next month. But you can edit and play around with this as often as you like during the month because they are only going to look at what deal(s) you have saved on that screen, when that time of the month comes around. So if you fancy buying £1000 of Lloyds shares you can just say you want £1000 per month of Lloyds shares, and then as soon as it's bought you those shares for a £1.50 dealing fee, you can delete it and say you want £250 per month of VEUR, but then the next day change your mind and say you want £200 a month of VEUR and £150/m of SSE and £100/m of VNQ. Whatever you have when the next monthly dealing date rolls around, gets bought, if there's enough money on the account.

So if you are contributing £160 a month you can say you want £500 a month of ABCXYZ and every 3 months or so once your contributions plus dividend receipts combine to give you £500 in the account, it will buy it, leaving you with dealing costs of £6 a year because there were only 4 successful purchases over the entire year. But yes, long story short you can set it up, do one deal, and cancel it so it doesn't try again the next month.

talexuser wrote: »

I've got over 50k matured from a 3 year bond which I want to put into two ITs. Does it seem churlish to use the monthly just to avoid the £9.95, given you pay stamp duty anyway and daily movements could be multiple hundreds either way making the saving look insignificant?

Just in case it's a serious question rather than rhetorical:

The biggest driver of your returns over most timescales is asset allocation. Fees should always be secondary. If you were to defer investing a £25k in an investment trust by a whole month to save about £8 of fees (a third of of a tenth of a percent) I would say you had your priorities wrong! Assuming you expect the investment to deliver half a percent or more return over the year, evenly paced, the opportunity missed far outweighs the fee saved.

However I'm sure it's quite possible to get lucky when making your investments by deferring the purchase, missing a loss, and saving money on fees, and feel vindicated for using the cheeky "monthly purchase" scheme to do it. That's not usually what you should *expect* to happen based on probability though, and the reason you're buying the investment trust in the first place is because you expect it to deliver more than cash, so staying in cash so save £8.49 in fees per IT purchase would be rather shortsighted.
:beer: