Is the Hargreaves Lansdown S&S ISA good?

iAMaLONDONER

Has it given good returns?

It seems good with no charges or are there any hidden charges!

Are there better S&S options?

bowlhead99

iAMaLONDONER wrote: »

Has it given good returns?

It provides zero returns. It is a wrapper to protect your assets from the taxman. Inside the wrapper you can hold any ISA allowable shares, funds, ETFs, investment trusts etc. In this respect it is no better or worse than any other self-select S&S ISA which can hold the same underlying investments.

It seems good with no charges or are there any hidden charges!

The charges are explicit in some cases (e.g. £1 or £2 per month 'platform fee' to hold certain funds which don't pay H-L a kickback ; 0.5% p.a. on asset values up to a certain cap, for holdings shares and investment trusts and ETFs). Of course, if you don't hold assets that attract these charges, you don't incur them. It is self select.

In other cases they are not explicit, for example you might find when buying funds within your wrapper, that you are exposed to a high underlying management fee paid by the fund you hold, while if you held it through a different platform (a rival to H-L) you would get a rebate on this fee, or be able to access a lower-fee version of the same fund.

Are there better S&S options?

It depends how much you are investing and what underlying funds, shares etc you want to hold. Customer service is allegedly quite good and the website is easy to navigate. Search the forum for 'best currently available S&S list' or something similar to get an idea of rivals. I don't even use them but know what they offer as it is discussed all the time.

Certainly if you hang out here for a while you will learn the options. Pretty much every page of threads as you flick back through this forum will have a thread in which someone mentions what platform they use or whether a certain platform is good for holding a certain fund or whatever.

Shaolin_Monkey

I have one and I'm sure lots of others on here do as well. It's not the ISA that provides the returns it's the investments you put in it. As you'll know, it's an execution only service and you are responsible for choosing your own investments in this ISA.

There are charges - everything has to be paid for at the end of the day. Some of them are explicit - like the 0.5% p.a. charge for holding shares, or the £2 per month platform charge for holding some 'clean' funds, but some of them are hidden. Currently, when you buy a fund, part of the annual management charge is paid to Hargreaves Lansdown. That's how they make their money. I believe on average they receive about 0.6% a year on funds you hold with them. They may give you a bit back as a 'loyalty bonus'.

This has been subject to a review by the regulator, and as a result is all changing over the next year. HL (and all other discount brokers) will no longer be able to take payments from fund managers, and will have to move to an explicit charging structure. So there will be changes. HL will have to be competitive otherwise they will lose a lot of clients, but it's unknown what they will come up with.

'Better' options are difficult to determine without further qualifiers. There are certainly cheaper options. You'd have to evaluate whether any alternative offered all the choice of investments and services you want.

There's a few places online where you can compare discount brokers and fund platforms.

http://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/ - Good comparison. Mainly aimed at investors looking to hold trackers.
http://www.candidmoney.com/guides/3/guide-to-isa-discount-brokers - Also good, with a link to another site where you can compare options based on your actual investment choices.