Halifax sharedealer for buying shares?

paul5046

It says £11.95 and you buy online. Anyone used it. I want to buy £1000 of Amazon shares, but have never bought shares before.

Dave101t

Use anyone, I presume you bank with Halifax, this makes it easier to set up i believe.

I use https://www.sharecrazy.com , i know it sounds weird but its an arm of hoodless brennan, totlly safe and charges only 9 pound flat per trade, be it buying or selling.

i looked at halifax but once you get drawn into buying and selling (i like 'penny shares), you may clock up 100 transactions in a year (50 buying and 50 selling) so the difference in cost would be about 295 pounds extra, wasted on the increased fee.

of course, the odd transaction and this wouldnt matter!

paul5046

I've never bought shares before, its a bit of a minefield, are Amazon US shares and all that.

maxi_isa

Halifax Sharedealing is fine - I've used them for about 10 years.

Amazon are a US company and not quoted on the UK stockmarket.
You'd need an international dealing facility. I'm not sure Halifax offer that but I believe Barclays Stockbrokers, who I also use, do.

JoeCrystal

What about Halifax ShareBuilder? Is there any problem with it?

BlameTheGame

Dave101t wrote: »

Use anyone, I presume you bank with Halifax, this makes it easier to set up i believe.

I use www.sharecrazy.com , i know it sounds weird but its an arm of hoodless brennan, totlly safe and charges only 9 pound flat per trade, be it buying or selling.

i looked at halifax but once you get drawn into buying and selling (i like 'penny shares), you may clock up 100 transactions in a year (50 buying and 50 selling) so the difference in cost would be about 295 pounds extra, wasted on the increased fee.

of course, the odd transaction and this wouldnt matter!

Why not go straight to Hoodless Brennan? considering they only charge 8 quid per trade and if you are a frequent user (trading more than 30 times per quarter) you get a £1.50 rebate on each trade, therefore making in £6.50 per trade.

Unless i am missing something.

Dave101t

no, im missing something.
it was my brother who suggested them a few years ago and i have just stuck with them. if the system works... and all that!

bagsacash

Be very carefull if you intend using Haifax share dealing. Their website is very unsafe and you could end up having your shares sold even when you didn't intend selling them. It happend to me four times.

The staff lied to me on several occations, they lose records of transactions so you cant take them to the Financial Ombudsman and they even closed my account and made a silly excusse that they couldn't contact me.

ozzage

I use them and I find it quite good. No problems with accidentally selling shares (that would be quite serious!)

I like the fact that I can trade RIGHT NOW for £11.95 or queue them up with the Sharebuilder and only pay £1.95 - good if you are buying regularly. I've bought shares both ways and they worked as expected.

SteveR

Hi,
I hope this is the correct place for this question.
I have been buying shares for many years to build up a high yield portfolio to produce income for our retirement. It has achieved an average of 10% per year with until October a very good capital return.
To reduce the cost of using a Stock Broker I moved all of our shares from certificates to the on-line Halifax Share Dealing nominee account. Over the years the value has risen above the joint limit of £50k each even after the enormous fall in value if that limit applies to a share portfolio!

Because the price of shares is so good now, we have recently been moving more of our Bank deposits to our better yielding safe diversified share portfolio (if you take a very long view). But recently I have been concerned about the safety of the account, so I asked Halifax who could not (or would not) give me a definitive answer. Then I discovered on the internet that a high court ruling in Ireland had ruled that the share portfolios in a Stock Brokers nominee account were part of the assets of the Stock Broker and could be used by a receiver to set off against debts.

I am obviously very concerned of a similar ruling in the British Courts if Halifax went bust, does anybody know where I can find a definitive answer. I have asked the question of FSA but "they are experiencing an unusually high volume of enquiries at the moment, (surprise surprise).
I know StockTrade offers a Crest account but the dealing costs are very much higher. Anybody know of another broker that offers direct CREST ownership but with cheaper dealing costs?
Thanks for any help. Maybe Martin might add this aspect to his savings safety page.

Regards,
Steve
p.s. I have always found Halifax very good for dealing but you do have to check everything on the screen, because it is very easy to sell rather than buy if you are not quick at reading everything in the few seconds allowed for agreeing a deal. And the limit orders are great in a falling share where you want to achieve a certain yeald.
S.

JoeCrystal

@SteveR At the moment, for my far off future, I am seriously thinking of using CRESTs for buying shares and the only online broker I found is what you mentioned, StockTrade. While they are very expensive, for shares I truly want, not necessary for investing reasons, at least they will be mine! :cool:

But I came across a site with Stockbroking firms offering personal membership Stockbroking firms offering personal membership

I hope it is useful for your searching.

As it is and as far I am aware, all nominee account with Stockbrokers' shares are held with Stockbroker as legal owners. I thought it applied to all online stockbrokers, and as such, I am under (hopefully utterly wrong) impression that Halifax already owned your shares now as you signed over all your certificates to Halifax. Maybe someone can correct my point of view hopefully.