Query about Halifax Share Dealing platform's trading costs

AnotherJoe

Audaxer wrote: »

So my requirements in my view are quite straightforward - to get a simple diversified portfolio, with medium risk level, to achieve increased income (from my current low level) with some growth over the long term to guard against inflation. From what I had read, the passive route was a good way to start at least, as there doesn't seem to be any guarantee of better returns with managed funds.

There are passive funds of various sorts (such as ETFs) which focus on income. Try a search on somewhere like HL which will allow you to filter. There are also ITs which focus on income, perhaps not passive but I think you are making too much of that aspect.

ColdIron

Audaxer wrote: »

So my requirements in my view are quite straightforward - to get a simple diversified portfolio, with medium risk level, to achieve increased income (from my current low level) with some growth over the long term to guard against inflation. From what I had read, the passive route was a good way to start at least, as there doesn't seem to be any guarantee of better returns with managed funds.

If it's not needed to pay the bills then a steady reliable income becomes a lesser concern. If you have other resources and this would be used to help out with holidays, home improvements or just to give your savings a bump every now and then then something like VLS would work. It's cheap and diversified even though its dividend is low, you can control when to dip into it.

Camster

I have a Halifax stocks & shares ISA and one off fund purchases are £12.50, but if you set up a regular monthly payment it's £2.00 for each purchase, so your five fund regular purchases would cost you £10 a month.

Audaxer

ColdIron wrote: »

If it's not needed to pay the bills then a steady reliable income becomes a lesser concern. If you have other resources and this would be used to help out with holidays, home improvements or just to give your savings a bump every now and then then something like VLS would work. It's cheap and diversified even though its dividend is low, you can control when to dip into it.

Thanks ColdIron, I think I will go down the VLS route initially, but may look at Investment Trusts or other passive funds that focus on income (as suggested by AnotherJoe) for the next tax year.

I see that for Investment Trusts HL platform fees are capped at £45 whereas for funds with HL it could amount to a much higher fee at 0.45%. Do investors often use more than one platform?

ColdIron

HL are reasonable for ITs but pricey for unit trusts. You could look at a cheaper percentage fee provider like Charles Stanley Direct or maybe a flat fee one like iWeb. The amounts involved and trading frequency will determine the cost but there are other less tangible factors such as ease of use and quality of service. You won't get a Hargreaves experience for an iWeb price with unit trusts. Think Waitrose and CostCo. This matters more to some people than others

Plug some numbers into this for a few 'what ifs', Choose funds not shares for VLS

http://www.comparefundplatforms.com/

Audaxer

ColdIron wrote: »

HL are reasonable for ITs but pricey for unit trusts. You could look at a cheaper percentage fee provider like Charles Stanley Direct or maybe a flat fee one like iWeb. The amounts involved and trading frequency will determine the cost but there are other less tangible factors such as ease of use and quality of service. You won't get a Hargreaves experience for an iWeb price with unit trusts. Think Waitrose and CostCo. This matters more to some people than others

Plug some numbers into this for a few 'what ifs', Choose funds not shares for VLS

http://www.comparefundplatforms.com/

I assume there is no way of knowing how good or user-friendly the platform is until you actually open an ISA with the platform provider. I am tempted to go for one with a flat admin fee rather than a percentage, but I would be disappointed if I opened an ISA and found that it was particularly poor. I know that on HL's website you can see all the funds that you can invest in with them before actually opening the ISA, but I can't see a list of available funds on the Halifax Share Dealing site.

bowlhead99

Audaxer wrote: »

I assume there is no way of knowing how good or user-friendly the platform is until you actually open an ISA with the platform provider. I am tempted to go for one with a flat admin fee rather than a percentage, but I would be disappointed if I opened an ISA and found that it was particularly poor. I know that on HL's website you can see all the funds that you can invest in with them before actually opening the ISA, but I can't see a list of available funds on the Halifax Share Dealing site.

From the main halifax website you can click through to share dealing and then investment options and then funds, which takes you to
https://www.halifax.co.uk/sharedealing/investment-options/funds/

From there there's a big button to "visit our funds centre" which takes you to
http://www.halifaxfundscentre.co.uk/

Having said that, as of this moment the search tool doesn't seem to be working for me.

Halifax have most mainstream fund options although as per some of the threads here they don't have everything. It was mentioned the other day that they didn't have any PAIFs and there were a few non-UK domiciled, non-UCITS funds that people had asked for and couldn't get.

HL is one of the biggest and most expensive and they don't have 'everything' either. For example the L&G Multi Index series (although someone claimed to have been able to manually order it over the phone).

Personally I'm happy with AJBell Youinvest for my SIPP, which has offered nearly everything I've wanted over the last few years and I have a lot of holdings in it. As it is percentage based for funds, it is not the cheapest if you have a large fund based portfolio, but under half my holdings are funds. My main ISA and unwrapped accounts are still with TD Direct which I find cheap enough for mostly shares and investment trusts, I don't have much in the way of funds with them.

If you are a newbie investor who is nervous about investing and wants to be comforted by a flashy website with graphs and charts and advertorial 'reviews' of the different funds offered, and app access so you can check your portfolio daily and think about making changes to it all the time, sometimes 'quality of website' is important and you would love overpaying with a high percentage-based platform fee to get that at somewhere like HL.

To others who will make purchases by direct debit monthly, or maybe manually once a quarter plus an annual re-balance, we are not spending much time on the site - and 'being disappointed in the website' is a price that many people are willing to pay instead of paying out lots of cold hard cash in platform fees.

So you are right that the platform comparison sites don't talk about quality of experience because largely, if you are just going to buy and hold one fund, there is very little that can go wrong with your 'experience' and the more important thing is whether it costs £10 or £100 or £1000 a year for the ability to do what you want to do.

coyrls

[FONT=&quot]Even when working, the Halifax Fund Centre doesn’t list all the funds that it is possible to purchase using their platform. When you have an account you can search for funds using the fund trading page where they seem to have a more definitive list.[/FONT]

EdSwippet

ColdIron wrote: »

You won't get a Hargreaves experience for an iWeb price with unit trusts. Think Waitrose and CostCo.

As a lifelong Hargreaves-dodger, I've never encountered their funds (or any other) offering directly.

Can you say what HL offers for funds above and beyond what iWeb and similar provide? This isn't meant as snark -- I'm genuinely curious.

It seems to me that once you factor out HL's dodgy funds "research", what remains is: purchases and sales, which in funds are always at NAV, priced once per day by the fund manager; collecting and distributing dividends; and an annual tax certificate, if relevant.

My experience of all of iWeb, Lloyds, Interactive Investor, and Alliance Trust Savings is that each manages these tasks perfectly well. All are flat fee.

As a long-term buy-and-hold passive tracker investor, due to the RDR I have had to move things a lot over the past few years to optimise charges. Which brings up another point -- transferring between platforms is relatively straightforward, so always an option in future. There is usually a cost to it, but in every case I have recouped that over one or at most two years. Most recently with Youinvest, where their charge change a couple of years ago would have handed me a six-fold increase in annual fees.

pinkllama

The £2 pm regular saver - is this per fund/ETF or can I bunch trades together such as £200 into each of 3 funds on the same day?
I'm thinking of moving over from Fidelity in April. I thought I read somewhere that you could invest into multiple funds/ETF's each month for the £2.