Which funds do you invest in?

jamesd

The lowest cost FTSE All Share Index tracker fund available via HL is the HSBC institutional one, also available in income form. As Rollinghome mentioned, I used the index itself, not a particular tracker fund.

The most likely mistake when building the graph is not choosing Total Return in the Chart type selection. If you don't select total return you won't get the dividends from the FTSE included and will see different results for income and accumulation versions of funds. That's a very significant difference for equity income and FTSE tracker funds and it's vital to include income.

Press reports that the FTSE has gone nowhere over the last ten years use the index value, ignoring dividends. It's up if dividends are included but that makes for a less sensational story.

jamesd

Simon, welcome! Thanks for those useful references, that I also use.

Would you please read the Companies Posting/Info section of the site rules and act as required there? Among other things you'll need to contact the abuse team to ask that they modify your user name here.

You might also want to update the popular funds page pointed to by "You can choose from our Popular Funds, all of which have performed in the top 10% of their sector over the past three years". The CF Octopus Partner Fund stands out as of particular interest over the last year. It's one I dumped some time back, except for a small rump to remind me how much I saved myself by doing that and remind me to do the same in the future.

Investment services that use Cofunds tend to be more costly for ISAs than Hargreaves Lansdown due to the 0.25% switching charge there. Some also don't rebate any of the approximately 0.5% commission that funds pay in monthly pieces to financial retailers, while in the ISA HL often rebates about half of it, though keeping the whole platform commission (another 0.25% usually) itself. That makes them very hard to beat for funds within an ISA.

It's much easier within the SIPP wrapper, where they charge full trail commission. Even so, the Cofunds 0.25% switching charge can easily make HL cheaper than a service that uses Cofunds.

talexuser

thanks for the info about the ratings agencies.

It is unfortunate the generic title "ratings agency" brings up images of Standard Poors or Fitch and their spot on AAA ratings for the banks and Lehmans etc just before the crash

Andre123_2

talexuser wrote: »

thanks for the info about the ratings agencies.

It is unfortunate the generic title "ratings agency" brings up images of Standard Poors or Fitch and their spot on AAA ratings for the banks and Lehmans etc just before the crash

Yes bad use of title, a different type of ratings agency, sorry about that.

Andre123_2

Hi,

Thanks for your help with the username, I didn't realise, I have raised it with the abuse team. Also thanks for the heads up on the CF Octopus fund, this should have been removed on a update but seems to have been missed, I will get this fixed a.s.a.p.

Your comments on cost were interesting of course this is just one of a number of factors investors take into account when selecting a provider.

Thanks again for your help, it's appreciated as I'm new to this forum.