bestinvest commissions/charges

Extractthecash

Best invest have a commission give up and in some cases enhanced commission, as with the other discount brokers. For selling you the product they get paid initial commission and renewal (/trail) commission. They are rebating some/all of their initial commission into the product in the form of reduced charges.
The commission is paid so that Advisers will use the funds network platform and be remunerated appropriately.
It should be enough to put best invests login id to get the discounts as they will automatically be set up on the system. I think that Best Invest will need to identify you as a client at some stage under money laundering regs, unless they have some kind of exemption if you buy online (only involved with the regs for Corporate Finance so don't know the full details for IFAs and financial intermediaries in this detail)
Does that answer your question?

dunstonh

Not all IFAs are paid the same. Some may get 3% commission, some 4%. So an IFA rebating the intial commission could mean rebating 3% or 4% depending on their deal.

Cavendish are not that great on rebating. Its easy to give advice and get paid commission and still beat or come in on equal terms Cavendish. This suggests that they may not be getting top rates from the providers.

moneytroll

does anybody know what "additional annual charges", sometimes also called "other annual expenses" or "other expenses", are for? (on top of IC and AMC) they vary from 0.05 to 0.9 from one broker to another. and why do most brokers not present TERs on their websites? which are the only useful figure for a a private investor who wants to know the drag on his investment..

EdInvestor

More about the Total Expense Ratio and a search tool for funds listing their TERs hereTHe TER should now appear in a fund's Key Features Document, as of last year.

However, shock horror, there are yet another group of charges which still remain hidden. These relate to "soft commissions" - payments fund managers pay to brokers for research and such, which are currently never mentioned at all.Campaigners are pushing the FSA to force fund managers and insurers to spit out the info on these charges as well.

When you add all these up, it's not hard to see how they gobble up 25% of your returns over 20 years.

Look at the ISA section here to see what you pay over the long term:

https://www.fsa.gov.uk/tables

Bazn

sorry to dig this up again..... but there is a fund i'm intersted in... the standard initial charge is 5.25%, but it is 2.25% if bought through fidelity fundsnetwork. Bstinvest are even cheaper, quoting 0.5%

I followed the fundsnetwork link from bestinvest, leading me to a best-invest logo-ed fundnetwork dealing page... but when i choose this fund it still says 2.25 initial charge....

why hasn't the extra bestinvest discount been applied? do they refund it afterwards or what?

moneyandmountains

Noone has mentioned Intelligent Money in a while.
What is the current consensus on them?

Extractthecash

Bazn wrote:

sorry to dig this up again..... but there is a fund i'm intersted in... the standard initial charge is 5.25%, but it is 2.25% if bought through fidelity fundsnetwork. Bstinvest are even cheaper, quoting 0.5%

I followed the fundsnetwork link from bestinvest, leading me to a best-invest logo-ed fundnetwork dealing page... but when i choose this fund it still says 2.25 initial charge....

why hasn't the extra bestinvest discount been applied? do they refund it afterwards or what?

Why don't you go to the fidelity FFn website. Pretend you are an advisor, click dynamic Key features on the right hand side and create yourself a personalised Key features document - here you will be able to see the charges, select the commission give up and understand that some brokers may have enhanced terms. - You prob shouldn't do this, but it will highlight quite nicely what is going on so you can use this knowledge to compare the brokers properly... that's what I did. Helped explain alot.. (htink there is a cookie option if you go direct to the private investor so delete your cookie if you have previously seloected remember my choice)

You will then see that going direct with Fidelity FundsNetwork, there may be initial commission rebates for going directly with Fidelity which is where the confusion may be coming from, these rebates may be the same as best invest.

You can change all your holdings to a broker and they will remain on the Fidelity platform, just with a different broker. Rememeber to consider renewal commission as well as initial commission when making your choice. Remember these investments are long term so maximise your overall return if advice is not required.

All this stuff is really confusing, rather than making brokers and providers make more useless documents full of the same phrases, maybe the FSA should concentrate on making the market more transparent and force providers to stick to one charging and commission structure that doesn't change depending on where you buy the product...

Hope this is helpful, URL for FFN is as follows:

http://www.fundsnetwork.co.uk