Charles Stanley or HSBC GIC

gif1

Hi,
I will drip-feed 1000 a month in an investement fund (HSBC Global Balanced Acc) within a ISA wrapper for the foresable future. After reading and researching I have narrowed down the broker choice to Charles Stanley (0.25% platform fee) or HSBC Gloobal Investement Centre (0.39%).I am not too bothered by the 0.14% difference; I have been banking with HSBC for many years and was considering a pros having all my asset in one place. Also HSBC would seem to provide more reaasurance than a fund house with regard to the safety of my investement. Anyway I am not sure which of the two platform would provide a better user experience. I would appreciate your view and any piece of advice. Thanks in advance

Windofchange

I am an HSBC customer, but went with Charles Stanley based on recommendations on here. I have so far had no issues with them, although I'm not sure they have access to all shares in all markets - I have done some searching on penny stocks etc and sometimes they don't come up as an option to buy. I put about 5 - 700 a month into the ISA wrapper FYI. I am pretty amateurish at this all, but no complaints so far. I think the thing that people have said with Charles Stanley is that if / when you build your fund to north of £100k then it makes sense to switch to another platform that doesn't bill a percentage for platform fee. Someone better will be along shortly I'm sure, but from a customer perspective, no complaints with Charles Stanley to date.

bowlhead99

gif1 wrote: »

Hi,
I will drip-feed 1000 a month in an investement fund (HSBC Global Balanced Acc) within a ISA wrapper for the foresable future. After reading and researching I have narrowed down the broker choice to Charles Stanley (0.25% platform fee) or HSBC Gloobal Investement Centre (0.39%).I am not too bothered by the 0.14% difference; I have been banking with HSBC for many years and was considering a pros having all my asset in one place. Also HSBC would seem to provide more reaasurance than a fund house with regard to the safety of my investement. Anyway I am not sure which of the two platform would provide a better user experience. I would appreciate your view and any piece of advice. Thanks in advance

On a £10,000 balance one is £14 more than the other and within three years you'll be at a running balance of over £33k which will be £50 a year wasted in extra fees if you are still using the more expensive one.

With the HSBC GIC your assets are not really all in one place, as you have your online bank accounts on one login and customer services phone number and your investment stuff in another. They might as well be different companies apart from the fact they have the same branding colours. They don't treat you any better if you have the extra products with them than they would treat me as a stranger coming in off the street. And they charge a higher price than their rivals because they know customers are blindly loyal and lazy when it comes to shopping around for competitors, so the customers will sign up just because HSBC are a big and famous bank without them needing to offer particularly good service to retain the business.

In terms of 'reasurance' the investment centre is a separate segregated entity from the bank with separate regulated FCA licenses, it's not the same massive entity you are dealing with for your day to day banking. Meanwhile Charles Stanley do have tens of billions of investments under administration and generally know what they are doing.

In terms of user experience you don't need much user experience to buy £1000 of a fund by direct debit each month. Both will issue confirmations of each transaction and tell you what you hold in your portfolio, what you paid for it, and what it's now worth. On that basis I would just go for the cheaper one. However, some would go with the 'familiar name' to keep it simple in their heads - even though they are dealing with a completely different business unit of that 'familiar name' when they start buying investments instead of using current accounts and deposit accounts and mortgages.

Alexland

Windofchange wrote: »

I am an HSBC customer, but went with Charles Stanley based on recommendations on here. I have so far had no issues with them, although I'm not sure they have access to all shares in all markets - I have done some searching on penny stocks etc and sometimes they don't come up as an option to buy. I put about 5 - 700 a month into the ISA wrapper FYI. I am pretty amateurish at this all, but no complaints so far. I think the thing that people have said with Charles Stanley is that if / when you build your fund to north of £100k then it makes sense to switch to another platform that doesn't bill a percentage for platform fee. Someone better will be along shortly I'm sure, but from a customer perspective, no complaints with Charles Stanley to date.

I also have an HSBC current account but hold my six digit HSBC fund on a fixed price platform SIPP and it works out under 0.15%. I like that the % platform cost decreases automatically as the investments grow.

It would be even less if it was an ISA where the break even point for regular contributions is around £15k (eg Halifax SD at £12.50 pa plus 12 x £2 regular investments = £36.60 = 0.243%).

If you can save money, for now, with Cavendish or Charles Stanley at 0.25% why would you pay 0.39%?