Cavendish or Charles Stanley?

vectistim

Funds only ISA. Monthly investment into about 8 funds using full ISA allowance.

Am I right in thinking they will both be charging 0.25% and no charges for fund purchases?

Am I right in thinking Cavendish have no charge for transfers but Charles Stanley is £10 per holding?

Does anyone have any good arguments for or against either or them?

le_loup

I have not used either and am with H-L.
But
I have looked at both of them and I'm not impressed with their websites lack of ease of use compared to H-L.
I will probably defect to one of them but life may be less easy if I do.

Lokolo

CSD have funds which I couldn't find on FundsNetwork.

I have found CSD more user friendly than HL but thats just me. I haven't moved yet, and not sure if I will. Luckily HLs charges don't come out until June, so at least after the swicthover on 1st March I can then look at it again.

Old_Slaphead

What's min fund purchase value on new & existing holding with CSD ? (ie with HL it's £500 & £250)

Also, with HL you can add to existing holding in smaller amounts by buying and selling on same day (ie you can add £100 worth of units by buying £250 & selling £150 same day). Can you do this with CSD ?

ColdIron

Old_Slaphead wrote: »

What's min fund purchase value on new & existing holding with CSD ? (ie with HL it's £500 & £250)

Same as HL, £500 initial and £250 top up

vectistim

ColdIron wrote: »

Same as HL, £500 initial and £250 top up

And monthly/regular?

Lokolo

vectistim wrote: »

And monthly/regular?

Minimum is £50 when I phoned them up last week.

ColdIron

I asked them that yesterday as well and again like HL £50, money taken 4th and invested 10th which seemed a little tardy

JohnRo

I personally like the CSD web portal a lot but there are still problems imo.

CSD customer service has been excellent in all aspects so far in my experience and I've used their secure message service frequently.

Problems though,

Their tax rebate entries in ISA account statements are impossible to decipher in my experience. Having contacted them they agree and have said they're looking into it.

Their online dealing portal has a very odd limitation, you cannot buy less than one unit of anything, so if a unit has a value of let's say £180 and you want to buy their minimum of £100 worth, you actually can't. I'm not sure if the selling £80 method immediately after purchase to obtain the £100 target would work with them though because I have never tried.

* I should just add this is for manual online purchase through the web portal, if you automate monthly or contact them, they can do it for you.

Server outages for short periods of time, not frequent but regular enough to be irritating. Also their 15 minute auto logout is irritating, TD have a 30 minute time out which is far more comfortable.

I like that the portfolio information display (and printout options) relating to stock, price and performance can be organised by the account user so that you only see the details & numbers you're interested in.

CSD pricing structure is weird though, no cap on their 0.25% platform charge with funds could potentially make them hugely expensive compared to many others even though they're often the cheapest at the lower end.

ColdIron wrote: »

I asked them that yesterday as well and again like HL £50, money taken 4th and invested 10th which seemed a little tardy

Agree, I enquired about manually transferring a monthly amount and the cut off for their 10th of the month dealing day is, you guessed it, the 9th...

Cavendish fall over for me on their horrible fidelity "lite" platform interface, primarily because it is devoid of any properly itemised transaction and cash balance ledger.

Lokolo

Thanks John. Very interesting. I agree about the 0.25% and no cap. Although with no trading costs (on funds) for the regular and smaller investors they come out on top.

I suspect platforms read these forums so any problems will likely be considered for future upgrades.

vectistim

For people with larger portfolios it would seem to me to make sense to stick previous years' ISAs (and non-ISA) into a tapered charging provider, and only keep the last year or two of ISA with a provider who is cheaper for smaller portfolios.