Minimum investment for Funds

meinnit

Can anyone tell me who will let me invest between £100-£500 in a fund? Most of them require a £500, £1000 or £2000 minimum investment.

Aegis

You can do it through Hargreaves Lansdown if you're going to invest a total of more than £500 or so. You'd need to invest the initial lump sum in a fund that accepts £500 or more, then use the "switch to another holding" function to get however much money into the funds you like.

Might not help, but I thought it was worth mentioning as a sneaky option!

nrsql

Try giving h-l a call.
I've heard it suggested that they will allow small investments by grouping the purchase with other clients to meet the minimum amount.
You could also try a monthly payment then stop after the first month.

munk

I probably said that

To cut a long story short, I rang Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) to ask if I could invest £4k across 10 funds with the understanding I'd be investing a further £6k within a few weeks in the same funds (taking the total eventually to £1k per fund). They were very helpful and said this was fine as long as the volume in each fund was enough to 'piggy back' my underinvestment in with other's contributions (or that's the gist I got of it anyway).

I think it'd definitely be worth a phone call to find out if they'd accommodate you though, just be polite and ingratiate yourself a little maybe

caliston

If you go for a monthly payment plan you can invest from £50 a month. Do funds supermarkets force you to sell if you stop the payment plan after a few months, or can you hang onto what you have?

Ian_W

caliston wrote: »

If you go for a monthly payment plan you can invest from £50 a month.

You can invest from £20pm or as a single payment in many/most funds with
iii.co.uk
- their discounts are not quite as good as HL and they don't rebate any AMC AFAIK but for very small amounts might be best option.

meinnit

Thanks people! I have done some research and found that iii.co.uk have a minimum of £20 and The Share Centre a minimum of £10 (even though their site states the fund manager's minimum of £500/£1000). I already have an account with The Share Centre so will go with them!

munk

I suppose that's another bit of leverage you could try to use if you wanted to go with Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) with a small minimum investment - say to them that you'd really like to use them if possible because they seem to offer a really great service from what you've heard, is there no way they can let you invest a smaller amount like interactive investor do? Maybe mentioning a competitor might swing their decision

meinnit

Yup thats true but I already have an account with TSC so what would be the advantage of using HL over TSC? I'm waiting to hear from them about initial and annual charges but I think they're the same or maybe cheaper than HL, just awaiting confirmation of that!

munk

I can't comment with authority but I'm fairly sure iii and tsc are both more expensive than HL - at least in as much as they don't offer rebated trail commission (again not 100% sure on that but maybe 90%!). Also I didn't personally like the look of iii simply because they were initially set up as a share broker and their transition over to fund management seemed a little botched. I have to emphasize this is only my personal opinion based on how the site looks and how their phone service was...

For example their help system looks to me as though they 'shackled on' extra bits of help for when they moved to doing fund management. I've also read on here that their fund management system wasn't so great (inherited from halifax or something?).

Also I rang up iii when I was deciding which brokerage to go with for fund management and found their customer services (cs) very poor. The girl didn't seem to know the first thing about funds and seemed to think I was talking about share trading all the way through, despite me mentioning a few times the terms 'UT' and 'OEIC' ('oik', I think she thought I was choking hehe)... generally I didn't get a good first impression from their phone cs.

No idea about TSC... remember looking into them a while back but was put off by their high init charges I think? Again can't be sure, might have been selftrade... maybe others can comment more with authority.

Aegis

meinnit wrote: »

Yup thats true but I already have an account with TSC so what would be the advantage of using HL over TSC? I'm waiting to hear from them about initial and annual charges but I think they're the same or maybe cheaper than HL, just awaiting confirmation of that!

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a cheaper trading account for funds than H-L, given that they rebate pretty much the entire initial charge and a part of the annual charge too. Rebating any more than that would surely not leave enough commission for them to even bother with!