Another Nutmeg inspired question

I haven't used selftrade for years but they were/are a stockbroker allowing you to buy and sell shares, investment trusts and ETFs which are listed on the stockmarket.

A 'fund' like Vanguard Lifestrategy is an open ended investment company or unit trust, which is offered for sale on a 'fund platform' through which you can subscribe for new units (they take your money and buy more assets) or redeem your units (they sell assets and give you your cash back).

It is not real time trading on the London market buying and selling shares from other market participants, which is what a 'stockbroker' does for you. Some stockbrokers also provide access to a fund platform and some fund platform providers will allow you to trade shares with a broking facility. More companies are offering both now so that they can be a one-stop-shop for investors but some come from one background or the other and have different price points depending on what they think will work for their core customer base.

So, you need a fund platform. HL provide one but there are plenty of others about at better prices (the link above is a decent start). Obviously if you choose to hold Vanguard Lifestrategy the ratio of different indexes is pretty fixed which is less flexible than your current method of holding different amounts of individual trackers but if you are fine with the mix they offer, it might work for you. Another one which varies the mix slightly is the Blackrock Consensus range.

Or you could just find a full on actively managed multi-asset fund or two where the managers don't solely rely on trackers; there will be several which are more expensive than Lifestrategy or Consensus but which taken together with a platform fee are still cheaper than Nutmeg.

eagleeye wrote: »

charles stanley is a better place to hold vanguard funds as there is no initial funding charge .Hl has got intital fees for a lot of vanguard funds.

I'm not so sure that's true. Vanguard do have an initial dilution levy on some of their funds but I didn't think you could avoid it by going to Charles Stanley or any other alternative platform. It is not a fee that goes to the fund manager, it is just some extra cash that's collected from new subscribers to a fund and put into the fund to help pay for stamp duties and other costs of joiners and leavers etc.

Charles Stanley don't show it on their fund information summary page as an initial charge(https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ViewFund?Sedol=B4PQW15&Isin=GB00B4PQW151), while Hargreaves Lansdown do (http://www.hl.co.uk/funds/fund-discounts,-prices--and--factsheets/search-results/v/vanguard-lifestrategy-80-equity-accumulation). But when you click through to the official fund factsheet (http://documents.financialexpress.net/Literature/14946029.pdf) or the Key Investor Document or prospectus or whatever, you'll see the dilution levy plain as day and CSD don't have a special way of circumventing them as far as I know.