SVS Securities - shut down?

manorhouse

Flatex appear to have a separate insurance cover which covers you for 100000.
I sold some sres shares this morning with Degiro.
On lse chat site others posted you could not deal early on with halifax and another big broker mentioned.
So i am not convinced the more expensive uk brokers are better .
For some reason there does seem to be a bias towards them on this page.

johnburman

We all need to be careful. We all want what the regulators do not give... Security if ANYTHING goes wrong with the new broker we will be compensated. 
An overseas broker is risky especially if the compensation is less that the UK gives. You must consider shares going missing or being lost. Of course that should not happen but it has. ICESAVE shows how parents do not support subsidiary company's also how states back their own citizens and throw overseas clients to the dogs. Final thought. You want many years trading experience both for solvency profitability and admin including the resilience if IT systems. As the old saying goes "no one gets sacked for buying IBM".i.e conservative is better 

masonic

manorhouse said:

Flatex appear to have a separate insurance cover which covers you for 100000.

If you want to rely on such an insurance policy you should definitely check it out and confirm the policy, presumably governed by German regulation and law, gives a foreign non-resident such as yourself the protection you think it does, in all relevant failure scenarios.

manorhouse said:

So i am not convinced the more expensive uk brokers are better .
For some reason there does seem to be a bias towards them on this page.

The bias is towards the cheap UK brokers, but not the unsustainably cheap brokers who are either losing money or making money from you in other ways.

juliamarsh

masonic said:

I use Interactive Investor as my main S&S ISA provider. I wouldn't go as far as to recommend them, but they are ok, and cheap for my usage. They seem to have improved considerably in recent years.

I use Interactive Investor as my main provider too and I agree they have improved considerably since I transferred to them at the time of the RDR review, the transfer was a complete nightmare but that was several years ago, things settled down and for the most part my accounts run smoothly; on the odd occasion that a problem crops up they have rectified matters to my satisfaction. They are better value for larger portfolios as they charge a flat fee rather than a percentage based fee but would not be such good value for small portfolios. They do not charge exit fees so if SVS clients are transferred to them there will be no cost to switch to another broker. Hargreaves Lansdown are good,but with their fees being percentage based would be expensive for larger portfolios. If they are the broker chosen by LC there will likely be a 3 month fee waiver for transferring out to another broker, which is what happened when Baillie Gifford closed their private investor accounts last year and HL was the default broker. So in either of these cases there will in all probability be a fee free exit for those who wish to move to an alternative provider.

olderbutnowiser

Thanks for the input julia.  I have not changed my thoughts from a couple of weeks ago that when I suggested that one of HL or The Share Centre (now to be merged with Interactive Investor) was likely to be our new broker.  A J Bell are another possibility I suppose but they still charge exit fees although they could give us a similar three month waiver from these. Personally, I am minded to stick with the broker that LC chose if only because I can't face the hassle of another switch.

I agree HL are expensive if you hold funds (0.45% pa - no cap) but for shares and ETFs the platform charges are capped at a very reasonable £45 pa.

juliamarsh

Having just checked their website I have discovered that HL no longer charge exit fees at all.

olderbutnowiser

juliamarsh said:

Having just checked their website I have discovered that HL no longer charge exit fees at all.

Yes, they dropped exit fees last autumn. AJ Bell are still holding out although I expect they will soon fall in line.

johnburman

thoughts on IWEB?  Owned by Halifax...so should be financially viable in the longer term 

dont_look_now

If Flatex (or any provider) have chosen to take out an insurance policy to give their customers protection beyond the official legal minimums, I'd regard it as prudent to discount that. Because if a provider was in real trouble, perhaps they'd fail to pay the insurance renewal premium, just before going belly up. Yes, that's a worst-case scenario, but the whole point of insurance or FSCS or anything similar is to protect against worst-case scenarios. So it doesn't really do it for me.

Some people have said HL and AJ Bell are expensive. They are if you hold a lot in open-ended funds (especially HL). For holding shares, I find them very cheap (low caps on holding charges), but then I trade rarely (so I don't mind the slightly higher dealing commissions).

IWeb are cheap in almost all respects (including holding open-ended funds) except FX charges, as manorhouse correctly observed.

If you want very cheap dealing, and low FX charges, and access to many markets, then from what I've heard (I haven't used them), IB are probably what you're looking for — if this is for a dealing account / unwrapped.

But perhaps the likes of HL, AJ Bell and IWeb might suit for the less actively traded parts of your portfolio?

Personally, I think that using more than one platform is sensible, when you are well over the FSCS limits. But not using as many as possible! Just a few, and make all of them among the most stable platforms (in so far as one can guess at this). I am using 3. This can be related to which tax wrappers (ISA, SIPP, unwrapped) you're using — some platforms are better for some wrappers.

manorhouse

I removed this post as dont-look had already covered it. .