Savings and investment

eskbanker

StevenGude wrote: »

My plan is open a stocks and shares isa. Within this can I split my cash into two different funds? Say I make an initial deposit of £1000, can I do £800 into lower risk funds and £200 into higher (maybe 100% equity based) funds

Yes, you can invest in multiple funds within a S&S ISA, but see below....

StevenGude wrote: »

There is SO many funds to choose from. How do I possibly choose or do I just pick one based on performance?

My 800 I'd like to put into something that is low-medium risks 3/10 (appreciate this likely means lower growth potential). 200 in medium-high maybe 7/10.

Can you suggest any specific funds to look at or a good way of narrowing it down?

I'd refer you back to the four leading global multi-asset funds that I mentioned at bullet point 3 in my earlier post. These are each actually product ranges available across a spectrum of risk levels, so you can review the differences across the range and identify which matches your requirements.

While some do mix and match to fine-tune the allocation, I'd suggest that there should be a single option close enough to what you're looking for, so if you were looking at the Vanguard LifeStrategy range for example, you can pick from variants with 20, 40, 60, 80 or 100% equities, so you could put all your money into VLS40 rather than most into 20 and the remainder into 80.

These four product ranges are well suited to one-stop-shoppers looking for 'buy and forget' off-the-shelf diversification, so are a good place to start if overwhelmed by the choice (as we all were once). There are some variances between them, such as fund costs, geographical weighting, sector allocations, investment strategy (return-focussed versus risk-targetted), etc, but IMHO you could tie yourself in knots trying to understand all the minutiae so wouldn't necessarily recommend making a labour of love out of it, especially for a small initial pot.

After reading the product literature, you could do worse than search this forum for mentions of them to get a flavour of what differentiates them, but you'll quickly see that it's largely about opinions rather than there being a right/best answer!

StevenGude

Thanks for all your advice. You are all extremely helpful!

My gut tells me to open vanguard as it's a simpler choice. However, as I plan on continually adding to my investment, doesn't HL offer a much bigger range for a couple of years down the line when I want to expand my investments?
Or should I worry about this later down the line and start small, and open a new account running simultaneously if I decide to expand?

eskbanker

You can hold any of those funds via HL if you wish, although they're generally regarded as being a relatively expensive platform - Vanguard does operate its own platform, which is cost-effective if you're just wanting Vanguard funds. You can open an S&S ISA per tax year and also transfer when you want to, so your choice of platform at this stage isn't irrevocably binding you to anything....