TD Direct vs Charles Stanley

karangb

I am starting to look at broker platforms for the first time. I have looked at few of them, and have seen that TD Direct and Charles Stanley seem to be the cheapest for my goals: (invest in funds, probably mainly Vanguard LifeStrategy).

I was wondering if anyone had any experiences with any of these platforms and do you recommend it?

Thanks!

AlwaysLearnin

I left TD last year as not happy with the service for a number of reasons. Went to Charles Stanley and have been happy with them throughout.

Probably relevant to point out that I follow a passive approach. Also for balance, if you search the forums there are plenty of people who appear happy with TD

karangb

Thanks for your reply. If you don't mind sharing, do you mind sharing specific reasons on why your experience with Charles Stanley was better?

AlwaysLearnin

They have just worked. I had issues with my account on TD that meant I couldn't see Vanguard Lifestrategy even though they were available, had issues setting up regular investing, customer service advice being wrong, and more. Comparitively therefore CS have been much better for me.

bowlhead99

I've been with TD for years with no real issues. Rarely need to contact them, although it seems like every year I get an email telling me I owe them the annual ISA admin fee; I write back to complain to say of course I don't, I have over £5k in the account so I qualify for the fee waiver, and then in the next day or so I get a standard email telling me that due to a system error some people got an email or account charge in error and please disregard it.

If you were looking for a stockbroker, TDD would be ahead of CSD for sharedealing - you can trade online in a load of foreign markets, have unspent cash in your trading account sitting around in lots of different currencies rather than going back and forth to sterling, you can buy/sell on extended settlement (e.g. T+5, +10, +20 days instead of T+3), they have a handy smartphone app which you can deal through, and so on.

Contrasting with CSD - if you wanted to buy some overseas shares like Amazon or Google via CSD, you'd need to use their telephone helpdesk and pay 1.25% dealing commission (minimum £75) plus £20 "movement charge" plus £30 a year custody charge on every line of foreign stock. They're just not set up to be a top-of-the-range full-featured execution-only brokerage.

However, it sounds like you are not really going to be doing any trading in individual shares, and just buying and holding a fund which both platforms let you do, so there is not much you need in terms of ongoing service.

TD was one of the early movers in terms of offering clean priced funds and when they first introduced the Vanguard lifestrategy stuff it was a bit of a market sensation in that they didn't charge platform fees or buy/sell transaction fees (because they were generally making commission from fund manager kickbacks on non-clean funds), so you could effectively set up a portfolio with them making nothing off you, unlike the other places that had a % annual charge or a monthly flat fee or a dealing charge. The pricing has since changed with the market so you can't get a free lunch any more.

However, at the time they were doing this, some people struggled to add these new funds into their 'regular investing' profile to dripfeed and had problems over a period of several months. They have given their website an overhaul over the last year and there aren't any current complaint threads here about regular investing at TD anymore, so sounds like it's all fixed. I invest in lump sums and never had a problem.

Probably if you search the forum here you'll see more complaints about TDD than CSD. However, CSD's offering is much newer - Charles Stanley are very well established but their online CSD service has only gone mainstream in the last couple of years - and so there are presumably less people using it and therefore less people to have anything go wrong that they need to complain about on a forum.

I would imagine your experience with either of these providers would be fine, so it just comes down to the cost structure for what it is that you're holding and what sort of values. If you don't need fancy sharetrading stuff or smartphone apps (and if you're just buying and holding funds, you definitely don't) there shouldn't be much to choose between them because there isn't much that can go wrong.

The idea of these 'direct' platforms is that you just DIY, and the customer service people only need to do any work for you if you are doing something like transferring holdings or cash in or out from other providers.

JohnRo

The TD platform is much better (looking) than it used to be. They made some upgrades quite recently but the buying and selling is still problematic on some lines of stock, in my recent experience. I'm not sure why, it seems to be something to do with the internal codes they use that may have changed with the upgrades, I even had to use a telephone deal to sell a fund at TD recently because the system didn't list it as available for sale despite being in the portfolio view.

The telephone broker I was connected to was quite arrogant and suggested it was either me or my computer at fault and flippantly blamed my anti virus software as causing the problem, which is plainly complete nonsense and I told him so. I'd already sold one other fund the same day that was showing and listing correctly, without any problem whatsoever.

Other than that, TD customer service is polite as you'd expect but not always effective or efficient in my experience.

CSD customer service have been flawless so far and I've stress tested them several times regarding some convoluted asset transfers, asset gifting, account closures and retrievals. The website has more of an interactive nuts and bolts feel to it (by design) rather than a glossy fixed image, presentation type, which is much more to my liking as it allows comprehensive data retrieval for off site record keeping and charting.

That said CSD is not perfect, there are some irritating quirks of the fund buying system that don't allow purchase of less than one unit, even if that unit is priced in the hundreds, there are also some woeful tax credit and dividend entries in the account ledger that make it extremely difficult to decipher the relevant holding they apply to, at a glance, if you have two or more lines that share the same CSD abbreviation, eg. INV MANA or AXA INV etc.

If I had to choose one or the other, based on my experience and preferences, it'd be CSD, no contest.

bowlhead99

JohnRo wrote: »

If I had to choose one or the other, based on my experience and preferences, it'd be CSD, no contest.

Just curious JohnRo is there a reason you don't just choose one platform on the other?

I don't mind having ISAs and SIPPs and trading accounts in different places if there are different costs or service levels that suit what I'm trying to do with a particular strategy or investment plan as part of my overall holdings.

But it wouldn't make to much sense to have an account here and an account there if they were broadly trying to accomplish the same thing - e.g. half your ISA money in one place and half in another can be a bit restrictive in terms of freeing up cash to efficiently rebalance across different providers, while trying to see the big picture?

MadMat

TD refused me an account, without giving any reason why.

Charles Stanley on the other hand have been great. no problems signing up, answer queries within 24 hours and have a very usable website.

Mat

JohnRo

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Just curious JohnRo is there a reason you don't just choose one platform on the other?

They're just legacy accounts, I'm slowly migrating everything to CSD.

Initially tried several platforms with different, relatively small, amounts at different times to get a sense of which I preferred. They were BestInvest, Cavendish, Charles Stanley, Iweb, Share Centre and TDD.

Still have an active but small individual shares account on Iweb. All other investments I manage, some might say muddle, are being consolidated on CSD.

My Cavendish and Share centre accounts closed a while ago.

I've only recently closed down the TD accounts, though still have access to a relative's account on that platform, and still in the process of closing down what's left of my very modest Best Invest holding for which the bulk transferred to CSD in April last year, I haven't been in hurry to tie up the loose ends so they've run concurrently but my attention is on the investments held at CSD.

Rollinghome

bowlhead99 wrote: »

But it wouldn't make to much sense to have an account here and an account there if they were broadly trying to accomplish the same thing - e.g. half your ISA money in one place and half in another can be a bit restrictive in terms of freeing up cash to efficiently rebalance across different providers, while trying to see the big picture?

I suppose it might depend on what you mean by "broadly trying to accomplish the same thing".

I use several ISA providers and have twice as many accounts again if my wife's are included. Can't say I find it a problem as would need to have more than one account anyway for each of our ISAs and non-ISAs and use a spreadsheet to give me the information I want and to bring the details for my own and wife's accounts together .

Investors using funds could find it useful to have access to a wider range of investments by having more than one platform and, with the various special terms several platforms have negotiated, benefit by finding charges lowest for one fund on one platform but lower for another fund on another.

I also feel more comfortable knowing that if I want to switch platforms that I can move the lotas cash from each of the platforms used one at a time and without being entirely out of the market - especially given the 3-4 months that some transfers are reported to be taking.

For the OP, the best way to get a feel of CSD may be to invest a thousand or so outside of an ISA with them before using them for an ISA - which can be a serious hassle to move. From limited experience with them, I found them pretty good.

vectistim

Based on current charging schemes I think I will end up using two platforms:
1) A fixed fee one for previous years' subscriptions, so just with the occasional rebalancing
2) A percentage based on for the current year (or two) where there's no dealing charge for monthly fund purchases.