TD Direct sold to Interactive Investor

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  • JohnRo
    JohnRo Posts: 2,887
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    Platform swapping fatigue is setting in with me. I'm all for being efficient and reducing costs but where platforms are concerned the concept is starting to wear thin. I've shifted various investments over the last few years on just about all the major platforms.

    It's getting to the point where I no longer care about platform costs, within reason, and just want the service and account portal to be fit for purpose, serve my requirement for accessible account/transaction detail and be reliable in the process.

    TD where chosen because I've used them before and baring one annoying hiccup they provide a very good service. They currently offer an attractive compromise on costs, customer service and account portal features but it looks almost certain, if the II deal goes through, that things are going to be changing in the near future, more likely than not for the worse.
    'We don't need to be smarter than the rest; we need to be more disciplined than the rest.' - WB
  • bowlhead99
    bowlhead99 Posts: 12,295
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    Pushing two systems together is never pretty but TD have not assets under administration than iii. What I am hoping for is that rather than TD being dragged down to iii's level, iii will be dragged up. Things like access to lots of international markets, multi currency accounts, trading extended settlement etc are all positives for TD share trading.

    However if they were achieving that by leveraging TD's market service expectations from North America and Europe and are now going forward with the more "basic" services that a UK consumer is happy to get from HL or whatever because he doesn't know better - then I may look to use.

    Not that extended settlement or foreign currency cash is allowable in an ISA anyway... but the general brokerage capabilities at TD are good and their front end was updated not long ago.
  • Have a read of the more recent pages of this 94 page thread

    forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4904374
    /QUOTE]

    Ah thanks ... sorry to hijack but newbie friendly platforms ? Preferably flat fee as potentially a reasonable amount.

    I read through the LangCat guide which showed HL up the top in most classes for fees yet gave them their "Platform Of The Year" award, now I take these with a large pinch of salt but reading through other info many experienced investors still use HL yet some here dislike, is this purely on financial grounds or is there more beneath the surface ?
  • bowlhead99
    bowlhead99 Posts: 12,295
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    I read through the LangCat guide which showed HL up the top in most classes for fees yet gave them their "Platform Of The Year" award, now I take these with a large pinch of salt but reading through other info many experienced investors still use HL yet some here dislike, is this purely on financial grounds or is there more beneath the surface ?
    Generally it is just on financial grounds. They are one of the most expensive but because they have a huge share of the DIY market, they will keep attracting loads of new customers because customers think the best thing to do is go with a nice big safe name. On a 'money saving expert' site, that is going to rankle with experienced investors.

    Once you know more about how investing works you become more jaded and cynical about all the 'free research and ideas' that HL pushes out to the newbie investors that lap it up as if it was free advice, when actually it is just the sort of advertorial you can read daily on Trustnet with the free 'insight' from fund managers being interviewed about how their funds have done well and are positioned well for the future, or about how their funds have not done so well in recent market conditions but are positioned well for the future.

    HL have a 'wealth 150' list of promoted funds to help you cut down the 2000 choices to the ones that are really good (in their opinion based on what will suit their interests). And they highlight first the subset designated as the 'Plus' funds which offer discounted fee rates sometimes declared as 'exclusive' to HL. Of course those are the ones that HL want to push people towards because they have agreed with a fund manager that they will try to get that manager a certain value of customers in exchange for a break on the management fees - so the customer won't notice HL's own fee is too expensive and they could have got a cheaper platform with a non-discounted management fee and been better off.

    Some managers like Fundsmith have great track records but refuse to participate in such promotions because they find the way the customer's fee money gets split between the manager doing all the hard work and HL providing access, is terrible. So despite giving the fund a decent writeup and it having enviable performance, they will just say "We currently feel there are alternative funds available which offer superior performance potential. The fund is therefore not currently on our Wealth 150 list of our favourite funds across the major sectors." and then not update their writeup over the next couple of years. Whereas other first time funds from co-operating fund managers who have no track record will go straight in at the top of the charts.

    Fees are more transparent these days since the industry was shaken up by the regulator a couple of years ago, but there will be various non-disclosed marketing payments received in the background I'm sure. So the research is not what it's cracked up to be in terms of editorial content and neither in the performance charts which only go back 5 years (covering the strong bull market and not the crashes of 2007-9 or 2001-3).

    Newbies lap it up though as the website is easily navigable and if you have a problem their phone and email support is well regarded - they are eager to make putting all your money with them as painless as possible. My dad uses them (he's in his 70s and hasn't really done investments since it was all tied agents and no internet support a few decades ago), and he thinks the interface is comprehensible for a 'senior' with loads of options that he doesn't really understand or feel he needs to, and I'm sure he would rate them well out of 10 given he doesn't know any better, like huge swathes of their customers who have never been anywhere else.

    So, they can win industry awards (even though everyone knows that many industry awards in financial services are 'bought', but some are better than others), and independent groups like Langcat who are keen to invest effort in navigating the waters to expose competitive pricing and expensive pricing will still acknowledge that they can be a well-liked option.

    There are some things you might want to do with your assets which can be accomplished quite cheaply with HL. For example setting up an investment into a basic tracker fund or two when you want to make regular investments and don't want to pay fees for every individual transaction, and the total value is not a huge amount so the recurring fee of almost half a percent of your assets is not actually a large amount of pounds. To get access to the investment, together with high quality support for all your inane queries, for a few pounds a year of total cost, is pretty good. Similarly setting up a SIPP when you are already of retirement age, and then withdrawing it after a year and a day as soon as you've avoided the early exit fees, can be dirt cheap.

    But if you have 'potentially a reasonable amount' you will find some of the flat fee platforms or brokers massively cheaper, as you suggest.
  • darkidoe
    darkidoe Posts: 1,125
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    I am hoping here TD keep their service and pricing the same. Very happy with the service so far.

    If I had a big enough portfolio, I would have go directly to Vanguard and avoided all the platform hassle. Does anyone here deal directly with Vanguard?

    Save 12K in 2020 # 38 £0/£20,000
  • i'm getting a bit dizzy with ISA transfers now ...

    2012: i opened a S&S ISA with interactive investor, which held various individual (UK) shares. almost immediately, they introduced minimum charges of £80 a year - not bad if you're holding funds, but irritating if you're only holding shares and trade rarely. but they offered free transfers out, so i moved to selftrade.

    very soon after, selftrade closed to new business - possibly something to do with their not having verified clients thoroughly enough. later, they sent over-intrusive questionnaires to all clients (perhaps over-correcting for their previous mistakes), which lost them a fair bit of goodwill. then they sold the business to equiniti.

    at this point selftrade/equiniti temporarily offered free transfers out, and td direct were offering a bonus for transfers in, and don't charge for transfer out, so i moved to td direct.

    now i'm going to end up back with interactive investor again ...

    while i have no idea what the new td direct / interactive investor charging structure will be, i can't say that i'm very hopeful about the prospects of being able to continue to pay no holding charges for a S&S ISA that only contains shares (no funds). the number of providers offering that has been shrinking (e.g. youinvest has just changed its charges). and i can see the reason: falling deposit rates. providers used to make a lot of money from the interest they gained on cash in customer accounts (minus the lower rate of interest paid to the customers).

    in any case, there's no reason for me to take any action now. i have a free transfer out, if i need it, and if there's anywhere worth transferring to.

    people who are using interactive investor to hold large portfolios of funds (for which £80 a year is pretty cheap) may be worrying that they will end up being charged a % on funds (as td direct already do). the number of providers offering a low fixed annual charge to hold funds has also been falling.
  • darkidoe wrote: »
    If I had a big enough portfolio, I would have go directly to Vanguard and avoided all the platform hassle. Does anyone here deal directly with Vanguard?

    not me.

    note that currently, if you go direct to vanguard, they don't have any tax wrappers (no ISAs, no pensions). since all UK investors should be using ISAs (and most should be using pensions), going direct to vanguard is not a complete solution.

    vanguard are apparently planning to offer a proper D2C platform in the UK - which presumably will involve tax wrappers, as well lower minimum investments. so this is something to look out for.

    you can also only buy vanguard funds directly with vanguard - i.e. no vanguard ETFs, and no non-vanguard products. it's not clear exactly what the D2C platform will let you buy.
  • northbob
    northbob Posts: 53 Forumite
    Has anyone here used 'Telegraph Investor'? The underlying platform is II, and the fee structure the same other than TI being cheaper if you hold funds as there is no trading fee for funds.
    http://investor.telegraph.co.uk/pages/a/trading-charges

    Any experience of the service?
  • Dird
    Dird Posts: 2,702
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    Economic wrote: »
    One advantage of TD direct is that they do not charge for transfers out of accounts to another brokers whereas Interactive Investors do charge for transfers out. The only other broker that I know that does not charge for transfers out is IG. Are there any others?
    Cavendish~~
    Mortgage (Nov 15): £79,950 | Cashback sites: £900 | Current accounts: 11
    Mortgage (May 19): £71,754 | £30k in 2016: £30,300 (101%)
  • Dird
    Dird Posts: 2,702
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    JohnRo wrote: »
    on just about all the major platforms
    Do any of them show your amount invested vs current valuation on a single page? Annoys the heck out of me that Fidelity only show current valuation & you have to go back & add up the transactions for each fund
    Mortgage (Nov 15): £79,950 | Cashback sites: £900 | Current accounts: 11
    Mortgage (May 19): £71,754 | £30k in 2016: £30,300 (101%)
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