Unwrapped ISA feeder for monthly investment

Plus

I'm looking for a staging account for monthly investments. I have an iWeb ISA, but I don't want to make monthly fund purchases because I'll have to pay £5 a time. So I want an unwrapped account where I can make small-scale investments, and then roll them up at the end of the year and bed-and-ISA them.

Let's say I make £300pm investment, that works out at:
HL 0.45% of ~£1800 = £8.10pa
Charles Stanley 0.25% of ~£1800 = £4.50pa

which is pretty cheap. So I'm curious - any benefits of 'reassuringly expensive' HL? I used to have an account before the fees changed and had to reinforce my doormat to receive the marketing bumph that they provided, but the website was nice. I have no experience of Charles Stanley.

Do you reckon HL's 'superior research' is worth £3.60 per year? Or is it all just marketing to fight through? Any other recommendations for fund brokers for small pots, where cost isn't the primary consideration? Are there accounts where such small scale investment gives access to useful data/tools/research/comment?

Eco_Miser

Have you considered saving in a First Direct Regular Saver Account or similar for 6% AER, then ISAing it when it matures. No fees, guaranteed rate, full FSCS protection.

Plus

Yep, got one of those (and a pile of others). I was more interested in an account to buy funds. The idea is to capture volatility by pound cost averaging, rather than simply making a big purchase once a year.

The question really comes down to: if the platform was almost free, which one would you pick? Bearing in mind the research/analysis/whatever is something I can use to enlighten deals I do off that platform, where I have more funds.

bowlhead99

If the platform was almost free I would just use the one that was easiest to use and had no exit charges. The research / analysis / whatever is probably available for free even if you're not a registered user and any website that publishes research about the funds it's trying to sell you is likely to be inherently biased.

As a side note, you are talking about using an unwrapped account for your dripfeed... but if you find a broker or platform that offers an ISA version of the account without a premium over an unwrapped one, there isn't really a problem using a new ISA account for your dripfeed and then doing a quick transfer to your 'permanent' ISA account at the end of your tax year.

However if you don't pay tax on your dividends and the capital gains are going to be low, it's probably more hassle than it's worth.

Vortigern

I've seen an article/post recently that suggested using a Cavendish or Fidelity ISA to build a position by regular monthly investments, then transferring that holding periodically to IWeb.

Cavendish/Fidelity have no initial charge for fund purchases, or transfers out. They have a small percentage fee to hold.

When that small percentage fee becomes uneconomic, transfer to iWeb who have no fee for holding.

Plus

Interesting thought... by using the Cavendish ISA and transferring you dodge both the transfer fee (none for Cavendish) and the purchase fee (of iWeb). I might consider that: the downside is they don't do share purchases, so I'd be limited to shuffling existing iWeb holdings if I wanted that.

What I'm roughly aiming for is a background monthly investment ticking along, and then occasional larger investments as I see fit. The larger investments make sense in the context of iWeb, but the background is only sensible somewhere else. The question is how to balance this, given I can only pay into one S&S ISA per year.

Another trick is to 'borrow' old cash ISA money - transfer old cash->S&S, and pay the same amount into a new cash ISA. But then there's HTB, which complicates the picture.

I'd forgotten about the HL closure fees, which I think kills that option. Do any providers have more comprehensive data feeds than are available for free? I'm thinking of things like Fund X-ray, and the more comprehensive data you can get out of Financial Express as a subscriber.

Vortigern

Vortigern wrote: »

I've seen an article/post recently that suggested using a Cavendish or Fidelity ISA to build a position by regular monthly investments, then transferring that holding periodically to IWeb.

The article was at http://redd.it/2xhcnn and discusses transferring from Charles Stanley Direct to IWeb.

The suggestion to use Cavendish is in the comments.

Plus

It took a while for me to realise that one answer is "all of them". I was in the ISA mindset where having more than one account on the go is hard, because of the restrictions on new money - which don't apply to unwrapped accounts. But just open accounts everywhere there are no flat fees and no fees for closure and withdrawing cash, and then try the platforms.

On that note, anyone know if it's possible to get access to the 'full fat' Fidelity interface on an unwrapped account, if you also have an ISA with Cavendish? I imagine if I sign up to Fidelity directly it'll spot that I already have an ISA and decide that Cavendish should be my 'advisor' for the unwrapped side too, which isn't what I want for this experiment.