Which fund would you choose?

BrockStoker

Linton wrote: »

If A is an index tracker and B a multi manager fund, then they are investing in different things with different objectives. A multimanager fund invests in a wide range of assets. An index tracker focuses on one. What assets you invest in is a much larger factor than charges. Comparing any investments over a period as short as 3 months is pretty meaningless, comparing 2 totally different investments in this way is just crazy.

The sorts of questions you should be asking yourself are
1) What are my objectives - timescale, risk/return
2) What investment allocation will meet my needs?
3) What assets am I invested in now?
4) Where do I need to invest more?

Then worry about funds.

I dont see the point of investing a little in a multimanager fund. The purpose of a multimanager fund is to provide a balanced portfolio with one fund. Why would you only want a small %? If you like the multimanager fund put most of your assets there. Otherwise put together your desired collection of niche funds.

Thank you for the reply.

Here is "where I am":

1) What are my objectives - timescale, risk/return

Basically to grow my investments as fast as possible over the next 5-10 (and longer - perhaps up to 20/25) years as well as providing basic income for my wife plus myself. If things go well we may want some of that capital to re-build a house on our property that was already a ruin when we moved here a couple of years back.

We own our home outright and have other assets to fall back on should any of our fund investments suffer so we are willing to take quite a few risks if there is a fair chance that our investment will grow fast, at least to begin with. Perhaps it's very optimistic, but my aim is to get as close as possible to doubling our current investment value over the next 5-10 years, and then gradually start to move over to lower risk investments/more diversification.


2) What investment allocation will meet my needs?

Basically, as I said before, around 3.6% - 7.2% of our total portfolio - as part of a fairly diversified portfolio which I'm trying to build right now. I don't want to diversify too much though, so I'm trying to pick a few quite narrow regions/sectors to bet on which we think will do well. I'm not going to impose any restraints (within reason) on exactly how much allocation, so that at any one time I can be "heavily over-invested" in a particular region/sector (or even a couple) that I think holds the most promise.


3) What assets am I invested in now?

Very overweight in the UK, particularly small caps:

Invested via Royal London 360 (Main portfolio):

Marlborough Multi Cap Income A Inc £105.0K
Marlborough Micro Cap Growth A Acc £68.4K
Marlborough Balanced A Acc £29.6K
Marlborough Global Bond A Acc £19.4K
Henderson UK Absolute Return A Acc £25.1K
Guinness Asian Equity Income Fund X Acc £15.0K
AXA Framlington Biotech Fund R Inc £6.6K
cash/other £49.7K
tot - £318.9K

Invested directly with Marlborough:
Marlborough Special Situations A ACC £100.2K


4) Where do I need to invest more?

I intend to sell all of my Marlborough Balanced, the Global Bond, and Henderson UK Absolute Return (bought as relatively short-term holdings while I wait for buying opportunities in the sectors/regions I want to buy in to to come up) over the course of the next few months and invest in Japan, developed Europe and the US. A little (3.6%) in each of those at first, but I'll keep some cash aside for top ups and to skew the weighting of a particular region/sector if I feel it's a good value and is likely to grow more than the others in the short-medium term.

I may well change the details of my plan, but I think my strategy is more or less worked out, and I'm at the stage where I need to identify particular funds to invest in.

bowlhead99

On your two potential investees, you said one was an index tracker ETF and one was a multi-imanager fund with an AMC of 4x the OCF of the tracker. A multi manager fund consists of several funds run by individual managers and can be pricy but result in 'best ideas' from the active managers covering the sector, while an index will just track a known metric up and down.

Multi manager fund of funds can be expensive and as you only gave us the AMC for the MM and not its OCF, the full OCF would be even greater, so perhaps the overall charges would be something like 1.25% higher than the tracker.

However now you have revealed the names the story is a bit different.

The tracker is not following a mainstream index that we've heard of, but a heavily customised index published by the ETF house themselves (WisdomTree Europe SmallCap Dividend Index) with a highly proprietary methodology for selecting shares for their fundamentally-weighted index which will be reconstituted periodically to take account of market changes. So, it's a published, rules based methodology but not one that anyone outside their fund management house would be familiar with. It also means there is no simply-available data to extrapolate the results backwards to see what the returns would have been previous to the fund actually launching.

Effectively with the ETF they are telling you in advance the criteria for selecting the smallcap stocks, and they are limited to only stocks that pay dividends within the smallcap universe. While by contrast a multimanager fund will be less constrained and the individual management houses selected by the top level manager will select their best approaches to address the world of smallcaps, which will adhere to their internal methodologies (just like the ETF does) but not actually publish that methodology and not be so regimented. So, a different and more expensive approach.

However when you look at the second fund, it turns out it is not a multi-manager fund at all. It is single manager, directly investing with a track record spanning almost two decades. The high 1.5% AMC you mentioned is the old 'bundled' fund charges for retail investors, while anyone in their right mind uses the clean 'Z' fund class which has been available for at least a couple of years at 0.75%. So, the OCF is half a percent higher than the 'tracker' not 1.25% higher than the tracker.

For what its worth I would prefer the Threadneedle fund over the ETF.

(a) The market for small companies is less 'perfect' than the market for big companies, with lower flow of information. Consequently, assets are less likely to be accurately valued by consensus and individual managers can add value by doing research

(b) The premise of only investing in small companies that pay $5m cash dividends in the last reporting year, as per the ETF, and weighting to those that pay the greatest absolute amount of dividends, will presumably help to ensure that the companies are robust. However it is a historic measure which means you are looking at what the companies paid rather than the research and forecast on what they expect to be able to pay next. Furthermore, a large part of the returns from investing in small companies (relative to large ones) comes from growth rather than dividends. I would want my small company exposure to encompass companies that were not paying dividends at a point in time.

c) The period you ran the graphs for is not sufficient to draw any conclusion because you would be mad to only invest for three months, so the returns are not indicative of what you might receive, and there is no indication how each performed in other periods. But for Threadneedle the data is available for other periods - 18 years worth. And those more historic returns you could look back at are net of quite high fees which don't exist today (i.e. annual fees used to be more than half a percent higher than they are now).

So, without saying Threadneedle is better than anything else in the sector, it seems like a more sensible option than taking a punt on a new proprietary index, imho.

---
Looking at the rest of your holdings there is not much in the way of advice or suggestions that can be given.

You mention it is not designed to be a balanced portfolio and that you have other assets to fall back on. You mention you "are willing to take quite a few risks if there is a fair chance that our investment will grow fast" without quantifying what you mean by a good risk/reward - what risks would constitute "quite a few" and what does "fast" mean for an individual holding? Something like your biotech one doubling or halving in a year?

You say you would like to double the whole portfolio in 5-10 years. So depending on whether you mean 5 or 10, you need annual compound positive growth rates of 15% or 7%, although that depends on how much new money you are putting in, if any. The reasonableness of getting those returns depends on whether you are paying tax on the returns, whether you include inflation in those returns, and so on. My assumption is you are going to be throwing a lot of new money in there, given you don't have a portfolio that is expected to achieve compound double digit returns.

If you are going to focus on narrow sectors upon which you have personal conviction, that's fine. Higher risk than just keeping a diversified mix, but if you think you know where the returns are to be found, go for it. You say you had three funds totalling around £75k that were really just sitting around waiting for buying opportunities. Now you intend to sell them to buy Japan, developed Europe, US. Does that mean you now see good buying opportunities in all of those markets or have you just got bored of waiting?

I notice you have a quarter of your portfolio in one Special Situations fund but it was not named as one of the ones you were planning to sell. Do you think 6 years into the market upswing is the best time to allocate 25% to special situations? My assumption is that when markets are booming as they have been for a while, there will be slimmer pickings for managers allocating cash to companies that are doing badly with recovery prospects. Generally spec sits funds are not quite so popular at every stage of an economic cycle. Still, it depends what you are trying to achieve and there are certainly some well known industry commentators out there who say they have an allocation to special situations. Whether that is because they have a vested interest in promoting those funds is harder to tell.

If you have figured out your strategy and are now just looking for the specific funds, it's just the easy part that you have left, which is great. However, if the strategy / goal definition stage was just to say "I want to invest in things that can go up, and don't mind taking risks, and will follow my convictions" that is perhaps not the well-articulated strategy that will guide you to the right fund based on clear objectives.

Anyhow, good luck with it.

masonic

BrockStoker wrote: »

Fund A is: WisdomTree Europe SmallCap Dividend UCITS ETF
http://www.wisdomtree.eu/product/3/equities/wisdomtree-europe-smallcap-dividend-ucits-etf

Fund B is: Threadneedle European Smaller Companies
http://www.trustnet.com/Factsheets/tnuk/FactSheet.aspx?fundCode=ADESCG&univ=O&pagetype=overview

First thing, AMC of the clean class of Fund B is 0.75% (OCF 0.88%), so that's half of the 1.50% AMC stated above.

Second thing, Fund A has "Entry charge: 3%" and "Exit charge: 3%", which probably means it has a 6% bid/offer spread. If correct, it would take you over 16 years to break even on charges vs. Fund B.

Linton

BrockStoker wrote: »

......

Basically to grow my investments as fast as possible over the next 5-10 (and longer - perhaps up to 20/25) years as well as providing basic income for my wife plus myself. If things go well we may want some of that capital to re-build a house on our property that was already a ruin when we moved here a couple of years back.
.......

Are you talking about income now? If so, I dont believe you can do all these things with one portfolio. I would have a portfolio to focus on sustainable income and a second portfolio for long term growth. If need be rebalance betwen the two on say an annual basis.

You seem unclear on timescales. You cant satisfactorily aim to maximise return over 5-10 years and also do it for 20-25 years. The two timescales demand different investments. Suggest you focus on the more important timescale and then review in 5-10 years.

Once you have focussed your objectives you should find the question of choice of assets and therefore funds much easier.

dunstonh

This is why you dont pick funds on part information or undisclosed data.

BrockStoker

bowlhead99 wrote: »

On your two potential investees, you said one was an index tracker ETF and one was a multi-imanager fund with an AMC of 4x the OCF of the tracker. A multi manager fund consists of several funds run by individual managers and can be pricy but result in 'best ideas' from the active managers covering the sector, while an index will just track a known metric up and down.

Multi manager fund of funds can be expensive and as you only gave us the AMC for the MM and not its OCF, the full OCF would be even greater, so perhaps the overall charges would be something like 1.25% higher than the tracker.

However now you have revealed the names the story is a bit different.

The tracker is not following a mainstream index that we've heard of, but a heavily customised index published by the ETF house themselves (WisdomTree Europe SmallCap Dividend Index) with a highly proprietary methodology for selecting shares for their fundamentally-weighted index which will be reconstituted periodically to take account of market changes. So, it's a published, rules based methodology but not one that anyone outside their fund management house would be familiar with. It also means there is no simply-available data to extrapolate the results backwards to see what the returns would have been previous to the fund actually launching.

Effectively with the ETF they are telling you in advance the criteria for selecting the smallcap stocks, and they are limited to only stocks that pay dividends within the smallcap universe. While by contrast a multimanager fund will be less constrained and the individual management houses selected by the top level manager will select their best approaches to address the world of smallcaps, which will adhere to their internal methodologies (just like the ETF does) but not actually publish that methodology and not be so regimented. So, a different and more expensive approach.

However when you look at the second fund, it turns out it is not a multi-manager fund at all. It is single manager, directly investing with a track record spanning almost two decades. The high 1.5% AMC you mentioned is the old 'bundled' fund charges for retail investors, while anyone in their right mind uses the clean 'Z' fund class which has been available for at least a couple of years at 0.75%. So, the OCF is half a percent higher than the 'tracker' not 1.25% higher than the tracker.

It seems I made an error somewhere, and rather than an OCF of 1.5%, it's actually 1.67% for the fund I quoted.

My platform (RL360) is a bit of a strange one and does not appear to currently offer clean share classes unless you can invest 100K + or more. I was going to ask RL360 about clean share classes but the email I sent to them bounced back to me, so I'll have to try sending it again when I get a chance.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

For what its worth I would prefer the Threadneedle fund over the ETF.

Thanks. After reading the replies here I think I will be going for the TN fund and definitely avoiding the ETF.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

(a) The market for small companies is less 'perfect' than the market for big companies, with lower flow of information. Consequently, assets are less likely to be accurately valued by consensus and individual managers can add value by doing research

Yes, that makes sense. I think it might also be true that in general small caps potentially have more growth potential that medium/large caps, but also more risk if the wrong ones are picked.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

(b) The premise of only investing in small companies that pay $5m cash dividends in the last reporting year, as per the ETF, and weighting to those that pay the greatest absolute amount of dividends, will presumably help to ensure that the companies are robust. However it is a historic measure which means you are looking at what the companies paid rather than the research and forecast on what they expect to be able to pay next. Furthermore, a large part of the returns from investing in small companies (relative to large ones) comes from growth rather than dividends. I would want my small company exposure to encompass companies that were not paying dividends at a point in time.

Good point!

bowlhead99 wrote: »

c) The period you ran the graphs for is not sufficient to draw any conclusion because you would be mad to only invest for three months, so the returns are not indicative of what you might receive, and there is no indication how each performed in other periods. But for Threadneedle the data is available for other periods - 18 years worth. And those more historic returns you could look back at are net of quite high fees which don't exist today (i.e. annual fees used to be more than half a percent higher than they are now).

I had not taken that into consideration. Thanks for mentioning it.

So all the plots we look at are essentially painting a rosier picture over the time when dirty share classes were being switched for clean: some of that "growth" during this period actually being due to decreases in charges. Is that correct?

How important is it to take this into consideration for someone like me? I guess when you compare plots of different funds they can be assumed to be affected by this more or less equally, so although the actual growth might not be plotted, the relative difference between the plots should still give a reasonably accurate comparison of performance/growth?

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So, without saying Threadneedle is better than anything else in the sector, it seems like a more sensible option than taking a punt on a new proprietary index, imho.

Agreed!

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Looking at the rest of your holdings there is not much in the way of advice or suggestions that can be given.

You mention it is not designed to be a balanced portfolio and that you have other assets to fall back on. You mention you "are willing to take quite a few risks if there is a fair chance that our investment will grow fast" without quantifying what you mean by a good risk/reward - what risks would constitute "quite a few" and what does "fast" mean for an individual holding? Something like your biotech one doubling or halving in a year?

I'm quite happy to risk a biotech doing what you described, as long as I have a large proportion of the rest of my portfolio in less risky funds/cash. Worst case scenario, if I held 60-80K of biotech and the value plummeted to half or less, my plan would be to top up on the way down, and hold medium to long term.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

You say you would like to double the whole portfolio in 5-10 years. So depending on whether you mean 5 or 10, you need annual compound positive growth rates of 15% or 7%,

Anywhere between 7-15% would be my target then.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

although that depends on how much new money you are putting in, if any. The reasonableness of getting those returns depends on whether you are paying tax on the returns, whether you include inflation in those returns, and so on. My assumption is you are going to be throwing a lot of new money in there, given you don't have a portfolio that is expected to achieve compound double digit returns.

I won't be putting any more money in. If anything I will be taking money out, so perhaps my expectations are very over optimistic, but I'm in my mid 40's, and I can't see us needing to take out any very large chunk of cash in the short-medium term (apart from some that I plan to take out and put into another platform for S&S in the very near future).

All will be held within an ISA, so as far as I'm aware there are only tax implications when I take out more than a certain amount.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

If you are going to focus on narrow sectors upon which you have personal conviction, that's fine. Higher risk than just keeping a diversified mix, but if you think you know where the returns are to be found, go for it.

I'd like to think my wife and I can pick at least a few winners between us

If they are not winners in the short to medium term, then we still have the option to let them go to the long term. It seems to me that 3 or 4 funds (making up around 30-40% percent of an 8-10 fund portfolio) "tied up" like this for a few years or even a decade, might possibly end up beating the other funds, especially if topped up close to the right times.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

You say you had three funds totalling around £75k that were really just sitting around waiting for buying opportunities. Now you intend to sell them to buy Japan, developed Europe, US. Does that mean you now see good buying opportunities in all of those markets or have you just got bored of waiting?

I don't necessarily see good buying opportunities in all of those markets at the moment, so I won't be selling anything just yet, but I'll keep reviewing the situation, and hope to get most of that money invested in the next 6-12 months. I may even not end up buying into all of the regions mentioned, but I will try to keep my money in at least 5/6 different baskets/regions/sectors (within that portfolio) at any one time.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

I notice you have a quarter of your portfolio in one Special Situations fund but it was not named as one of the ones you were planning to sell. Do you think 6 years into the market upswing is the best time to allocate 25% to special situations? My assumption is that when markets are booming as they have been for a while, there will be slimmer pickings for managers allocating cash to companies that are doing badly with recovery prospects. Generally spec sits funds are not quite so popular at every stage of an economic cycle. Still, it depends what you are trying to achieve and there are certainly some well known industry commentators out there who say they have an allocation to special situations. Whether that is because they have a vested interest in promoting those funds is harder to tell.

The Special Situations has been sitting there untouched for at least 4 or 5 years. I've been meaning to look through my paper documents to find out exactly when it was bought.

I was planning to swap it with Multi Cap Income (since they are roughly the same value at the moment, and I am intending to hold the Multi Cap for the long term so it can just sit there and be more or less forgotten about), and then perhaps sell it, but I think it has the potential to do quite well, so I'm in no rush to sell it.

It does seem very similar to my Micro Cap though, and along with the Multi Cap means I'm heavily over weight in the UK right now, but I think the UK economy is in for a good run in the immediate future, so I think being overweight, at least for the time being, is where I want to be. For those reasons I think I'll be leaving those three alone, unless there is a convincing reason why it would be a very bad idea.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

If you have figured out your strategy and are now just looking for the specific funds, it's just the easy part that you have left, which is great. However, if the strategy / goal definition stage was just to say "I want to invest in things that can go up, and don't mind taking risks, and will follow my convictions" that is perhaps not the well-articulated strategy that will guide you to the right fund based on clear objectives.

Anyhow, good luck with it.

Thank you for your thoughts, and good wishes. Your (and others on here) posts have given me a better idea of what my goals should be. I guess only time will tell if the strategy pays off or not!

BrockStoker

masonic wrote: »

First thing, AMC of the clean class of Fund B is 0.75% (OCF 0.88%), so that's half of the 1.50% AMC stated above.

I am still looking into clean charges as I mentioned in my previous post above this one, but Fund B (Threadneedle) seems to be listed at 1.67% OCF on tustnet for the RET GBP ACC share class, and I have a feeling that will be the only share class/OCF I can get on my platform. I'll make some inquiries as soon as I get a chance.

masonic wrote: »

Second thing, Fund A has "Entry charge: 3%" and "Exit charge: 3%", which probably means it has a 6% bid/offer spread. If correct, it would take you over 16 years to break even on charges vs. Fund B.

Thanks for pointing that out. I completely missed it, and I'm not sure why! I'm not keen on bid/offer spreads, and don't really see the point except to make more money for fund managers? So I'll be avoiding Fund A!

jamesd

For what it's worth I've held the Threadneedle fund for many years. You should add Jupiter European to your comparisons.

You may also find it useful to look at the investment trusts European Assets trust (smaller companies), Fidelity European Values (large-cap) and Jupiter European Opportunities.

masonic

BrockStoker wrote: »

I am still looking into clean charges as I mentioned in my previous post above this one, but Fund B (Threadneedle) seems to be listed at 1.67% OCF on tustnet for the RET GBP ACC share class, and I have a feeling that will be the only share class/OCF I can get on my platform. I'll make some inquiries as soon as I get a chance.

Because of the retail distribution review, the platform must rebate any trail commission back to you (in the form of additional units), so in effect you'll be getting the lower charges one way or another... unless RL360 is operating completely offshore and does not need to comply with UK regulation, but if that's the case then you may not have any FSCS protection either if they, or one of their partner companies, goes insolvent.

bowlhead99

BrockStoker wrote: »

So all the plots we look at are essentially painting a rosier picture over the time when dirty share classes were being switched for clean: some of that "growth" during this period actually being due to decreases in charges. Is that correct?

No, not really. What they are doing is painting a less rosy picture of historic performance, because the reported performance was after the gross returns had been netted down by high fees. Those high fees no longer exist so going forward, you will be better able to access high growth while unconstrained by fees.

For a given set of economic circumstances, the investor would get (say) 8% return now instead of 7.5% shown on the chart, because he would save half a percent or more by getting a clean fund with a small platform fee.

I think you're suggesting that the returns 'boosted' by a one off fee change - i.e. the fund was value 100, and it grew 9.5%, and then it somehow got a one off 0.5% from saving fees, so the chart says it delivered 10%. That is not how it works; the NAV was not boosted as no historic fees were returned to the fund, they simply didn't take out so much fees going forward. So if they say they delivered 10% then they really must have delivered 10%, and you will get at least 10% going forward (if the markets could be duplicated) because the fees are just as good or better than they used to be.

How important is it to take this into consideration for someone like me? I guess when you compare plots of different funds they can be assumed to be affected by this more or less equally, so although the actual growth might not be plotted, the relative difference between the plots should still give a reasonably accurate comparison of performance/growth?

Funds will generally be comparable. Generalising, some types of funds, like trackers, never really had mega high fees as they didn't give so much kickback to platforms or IFAs for advertising them, so there was less to be saved by the industry fee reduction. So, an old active fund probably did relatively better than the tracker than the graphs imply, because the active fund achieved its net result after it had been hammered with fees, which no longer exist, while the tracker fees might have already been blessed with low fees with no significant platform kickbacks.

So the effect is more between trackers and actives rather than between two trackers or two actives. But this is only a very broad generalisation as tracker fees have certainly come down - you could never find them at 0.1% p.a. five or ten years ago. The downward pressure on fees in the industry generally, with the improved transparency, has led trackers to just start charging less.

So comparability across funds is not a major issue, just something to be aware of. Is the fee the same fee you would pay now - if not, then your real performance will be a bit better than the graph suggests.

The problem with the fee changes is that many funds launched new classes so if you go and look at Sample Fund 1, you might see a chart that started in 2013, but actually that is just their new Class Z and you need to go and look at Class A to get the whole history back to the 1990s.

All will be held within an ISA, so as far as I'm aware there are only tax implications when I take out more than a certain amount

If your income and gains are made inside an ISA there are no tax implications at all. All income and gains are invisible to the tax man. Only if you take money out of the ISA wrapper (or have not put it in yet) and then invest it outside an ISA, will the income and gains be on the radar, from that non-ISA investment activity.

The Special Situations has been sitting there untouched for at least 4 or 5 years. I've been meaning to look through my paper documents to find out exactly when it was bought.

I was planning to swap it with Multi Cap Income (since they are roughly the same value at the moment, and I am intending to hold the Multi Cap for the long term so it can just sit there and be more or less forgotten about), and then perhaps sell it, but I think it has the potential to do quite well, so I'm in no rush to sell it.

It does seem very similar to my Micro Cap though, and along with the Multi Cap means I'm heavily over weight in the UK right now, but I think the UK economy is in for a good run in the immediate future, so I think being overweight, at least for the time being, is where I want to be. For those reasons I think I'll be leaving those three alone, unless there is a convincing reason why it would be a very bad idea.

It is similar to the Micro Cap because about a third of its holdings are Micro Cap sized companies. In the Micro Cap, about 80% are that size. It will have a different industry sector mix; the Special Situations fund is a third industrials and only 11% technology, while the Micro Cap is over 24% technology and less than that in industrials
http://www.marlboroughfunds.com/uploads/!!!!!!-mssi.pdf

Fund B (Threadneedle) seems to be listed at 1.67% OCF on tustnet for the RET GBP ACC share class, and I have a feeling that will be the only share class/OCF I can get on my platform. I'll make some inquiries as soon as I get a chance.

Trustnet lets you pick from a drop down to see all the share classes and its clear that the full 'retail' class is more expensive than the others. If your platform doesn't carry the cheap versions of all the funds you want, consider changing it. No point paying an extra three quarters of a percent for a fund when you could simply go elsewhere and pay a 0.2% platform fee to access the cheap one. Or if you have a lot of money on platform, paying a flat fee rather than percentage based could be even better. These differences can make a lot of difference to returns on the exact same assets over a decent time period.

If you are checking out clean vs dirty priced funds it is worth seeing whether your platform has a mechanism to refund you some of the commission on the dirty priced funds. Most do, so the costs may not be as high as they appear.

I would agree with jamesd that it's worthwhile including investment trusts when looking at how to invest in a market. Both JEO (which he mentions) and HEFT have served me well for Europe in the past. If you are investing large chunks of money, they can be very efficient to hold on most platforms as the transaction fees are pretty inconsequential and many platforms don't charge an annual percentage on shares and investment trusts.