investing in octopus

dunstonh

Do remember that we have hardly any facts here and we are making a number of guesses and assumptions and there is no consumer protection if you act on comments made from this site. The adviser has the facts and is giving authorised and regulated advice which does give consumer protection.

If you do have doubts, have a word with another adviser and get a second opinion. Or alternatives, raise the points made here with the adviser and see what is said.

jamesd

Or give them a phone call and discuss it. I did. There are three levels of charges:

1. Up to 3%, set by the IFA, for money going in, paid to the IFA.
2. Annual charges on the underlying funds.
3. Annual charges on the higher level risk-based funds, IFA paid up to 0.5% commission from this.

So you end up paying at least two levels of charges for something that an investment-oriented IFA can be expected to do for just the one 0.5% trail commission payment that they would get from the use of regular funds with only one level.

I told them that this sounded like a product for an IFA who was only really interested in sales and didn't really want to do investment work, so that the consumer would really be better off changing IFA. Interesting that in a quite friendly way they agreed that it was for a certain type of IFA who wants to offload the investment management work. This was after I'd told them what I was planning to write and asked them to tell me if they thought I was missing anything.

I don't see a sufficient reason for you to use an IFA who doesn't really want to be doing the investment management part of the IFA job. Better to pick an IFA who wants to do the work if you're after investment management.

LongTermLurker

That's very pro-active of you James.