Broker: Selftrade

Lplate

Does anyone have any experience of using Selftrade in their latest incarnation?

In theory, their pricing structure seems attractive but playing around on their website leaves me less than convinced.

Thank you.

Jsscmm

Lplate wrote: »

Does anyone have any experience of using Selftrade in their latest incarnation?

In theory, their pricing structure seems attractive but playing around on their website leaves me less than convinced.

Thank you.

I'll admit I have been waiting for a thread on this since the quarterly monevators table update... Personally I've not used them but have used other equinity services without issue. Their list of funds seemed reasonable comprehensive. I did note that their price guarantee only runs to January next year though, so my SIPP isn't moving currently.

Lplate

Jsscmm, thanks for the response. As you say, the latest Monevator table suggests that,at least in cost terms, Selftrade are well worth a look. In principle it is possible to operate a funds-only portfolio without either a platform cost or purchase costs.

This makes it all the more surprising that that there appears to be so little comment or feedback based on experience on any of the web forums. There's a fair amount of largely negative stuff relating to their previous 'iteration' but little on the current service. Hence this attempt to seek some feedback.

Surely some people out there must have taken the plunge?

rlzzzz

I've used Selftrade for years and never had any major issues, few small issues when they did the recent change over but mostly fine now. There seems to be one outstanding issue where I can't save PDF files in Chrome but it's fine in IE, otherwise everything seems fine and notifications of dividends and corporate actions even seem to be much quicker since the change.

I have quite a lot with them but I'm not trading that much and only buy individual shares mostly from FTSE250, for me it works perfectly and it's really cheap because their £1.50 regular investment counts as activity to avoid the inactivity fee. So if like me you're still building up anyway you can just set the regular investment to buy a share for £1.50 once per quarter at least so you're getting cheap trading fees and no other costs at all.

grey_gym_sock

i've had an account with them for a few years, but have only ever used it for shares, not funds. (i am currently moving the account away from them, for somewhat marginal reasons.)

the website is new (since january), following the transfer of the business to equiniti. feels a bit clunky, but i've got it to do everything i wanted.

i think selftrade was always more of a stockbroker, and didn't pay rebates on funds, so wasn't good value for funds until RDR2 forced them to change their charging structure, after which they are suddenly very cheap. which is a bit like iweb/halifax; except that selftrade have been closed to new business for most of the time since RDR2.

selftrade's regular investment service includes very few funds, and the 1 or 2 i looked at appeared to be old commission-paying units. if you forget about regular investments, funds available to buy now include many vanguard funds (though vanguard UK all share index was marked as not available to buy - presumably they could fix that; they might have all the other vanguard funds available, though i only glanced at it).

so you may well need to make purchases of funds manually. still for no charge. you could (if you wanted) still fund your account via monthly DD. you need to make 1 purchase or sale per quarter to avoid the inactivity charge.

avoiding the inactivity fee seems a bit fiddly to me, but some ppl may not mind. halifax costs slightly more (£2 per purchase if you use regular dealing - and i think you can buy just about anything in regular dealing; and £12.50 annual fee for an ISA, though nothing for a taxable account; and £12.50 for sales, the same as selftrade), without the fiddle. i have funds in an iweb account (£5 for sales and purchases; no annual fees), but i got in before there was an account opening fee (now £200).