another query about online brokers

moneylover

Hello, I am with X-O and not liking it much at the moment.

I cannot re-invest dividends except by making a full cost trade - have posted about this and had some useful replies. Thank you alll

Now have another question. If I place a delayed order so that a buy is not executed until the share price drops to a certain level, the appropriate funds are tied to that deal. So you cannot have, say, half a dozen possible trades set up and the money follow the deal that would be executed first. When I was with Selftrade several years ago (I stopped investing for a while and have just come back to it) you could set up as many deals as you liked. Then if one tried to execute and no money was left in the account the deal just failed. So this gives much more flexibility especially for when you are at work all day and cannot look at prices regularly

What is the situation with other brokers that people use? At the m oment I am thinking of transferring to Interactive Investor or Halifax as these are the only ones I can find that do dividend re-investing but arguably the facility to do deals more easily would over ride this.

Many thanks

westy22

With iii (Interactive Investor) you pay a £2.00 charge to place a 'limit' order under their Tradeplan - if the limit bid is successful the £2 is deducted from the normal £10 dealing fee so, in other words, the cost of setting the limit is nil. If the bid is not successful or time expires then you have lost the £2 charge.

Therefore if you set up 5 limit orders to last for say 7 days then the cost to you is £10 (5 x £2) at the time of placing the order. If all are successful then you will have the £10 deducted from the normal £50 dealing fee. If none are successful you have lost £10.

As far as I know if you have insufficient funds on account to execute the deal then the deal will fail but you will have still lost £2.

moneylover

re iii - brokers are certainly getting inventive arent they!

westy22

brokers are certainly getting inventive arent they!

Not too long ago you would have paid a broker maybe £25 to execute a deal. Competition and online dealing has pushed prices down so they now look to all the little extras to recoup lost profits