Alliance Trust

caveat_emptor

I have an investment trust ISA and I'm charged £90/annum for custody and get two valuation reports. The charge for transferring out is £100. Is this a record?

EdSwippet

caveat_emptor wrote: »

I have an investment trust ISA and I'm charged £90/annum for custody and get two valuation reports. The charge for transferring out is £100. Is this a record?

If you hold more than £22,500 in your ISA then Bestinvest's 0.4% per year charge on balances below £250,000 handily exceeds £90. And if you hold more than four investment trusts then Bestinvest's £25 per line transfer out charge handily exceeds £100.

Nothing particular against Bestinvest -- it's just the one I happened on here. I'm sure you can find other platforms where your costs would exceed those of Alliance Trust. And maybe you can find cheaper ones -- in which case you should move, since with a decent annual cost reduction you would recover the transfer out charge in a relatively short period.

bowlhead99

caveat_emptor wrote: »

I have an investment trust ISA and I'm charged £90/annum for custody and get two valuation reports. The charge for transferring out is £100. Is this a record?

No.

Also, if you had £100k invested, the charge would be an inconsequential fraction of a percent of your assets. Is it their fault that you don't?

If it's expensive, find a cheaper place.

dunstonh

When you research platforms, you need to be aware of their charges in and their charges out. A number of the so called cheap ones have large menus of charges for various tasks and those things do tend to cost more.

bigadaj

caveat_emptor wrote: »

I have an investment trust ISA and I'm charged £90/annum for custody and get two valuation reports. The charge for transferring out is £100. Is this a record?

That's at the lower end of the charging spectrum, it may look expensive if you only have small sums in it.

For comparison of costs then monevator has a useful table, and also comoarefundplatforms has a useful tool which shows total charges within different wrappers and different investments, this would indicate whether you are getting good value or not.

caveat_emptor

Thanks for putting me straight. It just seemed to me that the charges were OTT for the cost of providing the service. I certainly would not have chosen Alliance Trust but my investment trust managers chose AT as custodians and investor relations managers.
I am aware that there are lower cost platforms hence my OP.