T D Waterhouse & others cheating us on Interest Rates on self select PEPs and ISAs

JM_2

Hi,

Help someone.

Please tell T D Waterhouse that interest rates have gone up several times.

Their phone number : 0800 531 6693

When are they going to increase their rates ?

They advertise they here :

http://www.tdwaterhouse.co.uk/sitemap.cfm


" Happy with your current broker?
It's time they went head to head with us "



Well they need their head butted for sure


JM_2

Save us from Sharks :

Biggles

It's called 'market forces', JM2. If there were a demand, for some reason, for a S&S ISA paying high interest while it held funds waiting to be invested, there would be such an account.

In the meantime, why is it 'unfair' and 'cheating' you? Are they lying about the interest rate, pretending it is high when it idn't?

Get over it. This is how ISAs work. If you keep in cash for too long, I believe they are supposed to move your funds out of the ISA, which will lose your tax-free status.

JM_2

Biggles wrote: »

It's called 'market forces', JM2. If there were a demand, for some reason, for a S&S ISA paying high interest while it held funds waiting to be invested, there would be such an account.

In the meantime, why is it 'unfair' and 'cheating' you? Are they lying about the interest rate, pretending it is high when it idn't?

Get over it. This is how ISAs work. If you keep in cash for too long, I believe they are supposed to move your funds out of the ISA, which will lose your tax-free status.

At one time most plan managers paid market rate of interest.

One by one they have cut the rates to very low levels.

Is there no law against these plan managers colluding with each other.


JM_2

jamesd

JM_2, so switch to Hargreaves Lansdown or someone else, get their rate of interest and remove that profit from TD Waterhouse. It's reasonable to expect the plan managers to profit from you as long as you're willing to take it and not move. So long as you stick around you're rewarding them, which is why they can successfullly do it.

masonic

Sometimes I think people just like having something to complain about.

cloud_dog

JM2, why don't you just move to another provider, relax and enjoy life more

NonGeographicalMan

JM_2 wrote: »

At one time most plan managers paid market rate of interest.

One by one they have cut the rates to very low levels.

Is there no law against these plan managers colluding with each other.


JM_2

JM2, I have read this thread with interest as I totally concur with everything you say about the great cash deposit ripoff on Self Select ISAs and PEPs. I am sorry to see that some of the forces of pedantry and cliqueishness who inhabit this forum and derive emotional satisfaction from trying to rip the legitimate arguments of others to shreds have tried to put down your own extremely valid arguments without any reasonable justification.

I held a self select PEP that was originally with Albert E Sharp and then Charles Schwab and finally Barclays Stockbrokers (due to continued takeovers) and this PEP for various reasons held large amounts of cash for long periods. To cut a long story short both Albert E Sharp and Schwabs paid perfectly fair interest rates of over 3% to 4% on cash (especially given that the market rate was then less than 5%) but when Barclays took over they cut the rate to 1% or so and then consumed most of that with charges on an account that by then only held cash and no shares or unit trusts. So I moved that PEP to Hargreaves Lansdown after I realised I had been done out of nearly £1,000 in interest over several years. Barclays were totally unapologetic over the matter being the total shysters they are, even though I wrote as far as their main board directors.

I discovered in a web archive that a couple of years ago T D Waterhouse actively marketed what a good rate of interest they were paying on cash balances on self select ISAs and PEPs but then they and Barclays and several firms cut the rate to virtually nil in what has quite blatantly been a cartel like move due to the enormous recent rationalisation in the online share dealing market. And even the supposedly good 4.25% rate at Hargreaves Lansdown is not that because they pay you a lower rate on the first £7,000. And also they have not increased their rates in line with recent increases in the market rate of interest like all the others.

I am currently having to shift my Self Select ISA after being shown the door by Mr Peter Hargreaves at Hargreaves Lansdown for daring to quibble with a few matters of company policy such as the highly insecure nature of the HL website's username and password log on boxes, the refusal of Hargreaves Lansdown to provide company reports and accounts on funds held in their ISAs and PEPs and then finally after I applied for their share offer they cheekily hung on to the £5,5000 they did not allocate to me in shares and instead wrote to me asking if I did not want to invest it in yet more funds well above the investors compensation scheme limit with them. Mr Hargreaves then wrote back to me in extraordinarily aggressive terms telling me to basically either shut up or take my business elsewhere and when I then contested his very high handed behaviour with the company's compliance officer I was given my marching orders.

It has become apparent from staff comments that Mr Hargreaves in fact does this quite regularly to investors who send him personally emails of complaint. Mr Hargreaves seems to enjoy his tyrranical ability to exercise absolute power over his customers and basically behaves like an old fashioned small shopkeeper.

So now I am left hunting round for alternatives and can find no one running a Self Select ISA/PEP plan with a better rate of interest on cash deposits than HL and no one matching their range of discounts on OEIC and unit trust initial charges. No doubt what Mr Hargreaves knows that investors will find when he decides to excommunicate them.

As things stand jokers like Barclays and TD Waterhouse pay almost nothing interest wise after their annual PEP and ISA charges and people like Alliance Capital and Halifax pay at best just over 3% while Selftrade pays 3.75% on all cash if the cash balance is £15,000 or over but much less than that if less than £15,000 is held in cash. In other words no one comes close to my online cash savings with Icesave now paying 6.20%,

Those of you who say why not run the arrangements yourself ignore the fact you cannot do this and get an ISA or PEP wrapper as well. But when you consider a capital gains tax allowance of £9,000 per annum perhaps it is better to do away with the PEP/ISA wrapper altogether and then bed and breakfast the maximum every year and then earn 6.2% on any money you want to keep out of the market and hold in cash.................

I raised the whole issue of cartel like behaviour exploiting captive Self Select ISA and OEIC customers with the Office of Fair Trading yesterday and they seemed quite interested in investigating and are going to come back to me. All these interest rates on cash on Self Select ISAs are a blatant ripoff. The only thing that varies is the scale of the ripoff. The brazen levels of ripoff at Barclays and TD Waterhouse are quite beyond belief.

jamesd

NonGeographicalMan, please say why you believe that the login of the Hargreaves Lansdown site is insecure.

Not providing printed reports doesn't bother me since they are readily available online for printing. Lack of ability to vote as desired or abstain could be more of a concern.

Good to read that Hargreaves Lansdown won't be continuing to have your business because you weren't happy with them, just as with others you weren't satisfied with. Best wishes in obtaining a better deal and encouraging a competitive marketplace.

NonGeographicalMan

jamesd wrote: »

NonGeographicalMan, please say why you believe that the login of the Hargreaves Lansdown site is insecure.

Plain white boxes for entry of username and password and the requirement for the entry of the whole password and not just some characters in it from say drop down click character boxes (as per secure banking website practice) is a key logger software writer's paradise. Especially given the sums of money invested. I think HL will use the excuse that you can only get money out of the account by a cheque being sent to your home address but there are ways for that to be easily intercepted if you live in a flat with a shared post box and also a huge amount of damage can be done to your online portfolio by someone selling your original holdings and buying high risk penny shares instead.

Not providing printed reports doesn't bother me since they are readily available online for printing. Lack of ability to vote as desired or abstain could be more of a concern.

Its the lack of voting rights that bothers me more but the right to vote usually accompanies the paperwork that arrives in the same envelope as managers reports etc. So loss of the one seems to go with the other.

Good to read that Hargreaves Lansdown won't be continuing to have your business because you weren't happy with them, just as with others you weren't satisfied with.

The problem is that due to the existence of the bltantly cartel like arrangement on lousy cash interest rates in self select ISAs and most other online stockbrokers, apart from Hargreaves, thinking they can charge a transaction fee on buying and selling funds the alternatives aren't that good. Also discounts on inital charges aren't as good elsewhere compared to Hargreaves as no other broker is big enough to bully most fund managers in to rebating all of the initial charge back to them as commission.

Hargreaves's monopolistic position in terms of Unit Trust/OEIC market dominance and no near competitors would I imagine explain the large premium paid for their shares on flotation.

jamesd

NonGeographicalMan, you make a valid point about keyloggers but personally I'm more concerned about the lack of something like a shared secret (image or word that only you and the site know) to make it harder to scam people by email. The system used by A&L is quite nice, even if they do use a full PIN with it

The use of a dealing password as well and their requirement that you use written communication to take out money seems to provide a fair bit of protection. Not as much as they could do, though.

The one I like least is Egg, which requires you to type your mother's maiden name to log in, potentially compromising that. Their automated call system to verify transactions is also unpleasant, asking you to disclose your date of birth before authenticating itself to you in some trustworthy way, other than the insecure calling line ID. Combine the two and wave goodbye to two useful bits of identity theft data. I hang up on the verification valls and call back at their regular number, on the rare occasions when it actually finds me awake.

Hargreaves Lansdown do seem to be building up a significant economic moat. Pension companies continuing the trend to offering a broader range of investments and perhaps offering similarly easy online switching might inhibit them on the SIPP side, if the pension companies manage to do it well. I doubt that they will do it well enough.