How do I find which platforms offer the funds/ shares I want?

badger09

vitamin_joe said:

Well firstly, the main part of the post that I didn't recognise as being to do with me was the section which says, "you've been told that in the past." I haven't had anyone tell me this in the past, so it seemed a logical conclusion that I had been mistaken for someone else.  

The post you have quoted received no replies, and I continued to do my own research. What changed? Well, for a start the market collapsed. I'm not keen to invest in stocks and shares right now, because I feel there is further to fall, but I am interested in learning about ways of doing this when the outlook is more positive. That's the purpose of this thread- to learn more about investing, without necessarily wanting to put my money where my mouth is right at this moment. As a beginner, it would seem to me to be a crucial time to exercise a certain amount of caution, whilst also seeking to increase my knowledge base. That would seem to me to be a fair strategy. 

The three potential investments I chose were examples, as stated in the original post. I've learned a lot from it, and I appreciate the help I've been given. 

If you insist
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5402106/i-want-to-transfer-my-cash-isa-into-stocks-and-shares-how-do-i-know-the-share-price#latest

Before you ask, I don't very often trawl through other poster's previous posts, but the choices in your OP struck me as being so bizarre that I was curious.

So no, I didn't mistake you for someone else.

vitamin_joe

That thread is from over four years ago! It asks a different question to the one asked in this one. At no point does anyone advise me what you claim. The closest I can see is this line.

 As suggested above, for most people a better choice would be some form of collective investment (funds). 

Which is different to what you are saying, but an idea which I fully accept. Does accepting it mean that I should never learn how to invest in an individual fund, or how to research a company? Or that my attitude to investing might change over the course of four years?

Alright, cheers.

bowlhead99

vitamin_joe said:

That thread is from over four years ago! It asks a different question to the one asked in this one. At no point does anyone advise me what you claim. The closest I can see is this line.

 As suggested above, for most people a better choice would be some form of collective investment (funds). 

Which is different to what you are saying, but an idea which I fully accept. Does accepting it mean that I should never learn how to invest in an individual fund, or how to research a company? Or that my attitude to investing might change over the course of four years?

Alright, cheers.

I'm not trying to pick an argument here but:

A few years ago you had a thread about investment ISAs and asked about buying shares in a utility company.

On that thread, Eco_Miser told you: "BTW investing in a single company is considered very high risk"; you said in reply that you had considered an investment in United Utilities and thought it was low risk, and Alan_P mentioned that no individual company is low risk. He suggested that instead, spreading your investment across multiple companies in various parts of the world would reduce the risk and that most novice investors including himself would invest in collective investment schemes across companies and geographies rather than play at individual stockpicking. Coryls followed up to say that just because it was called a stocks and shares ISA you didn't literally need to buy individual stocks to put in it, and for most people it would be a better choice to use collective investment funds, which perhaps you could research while the transfer from your cash ISA was going ahead.

Then a few weeks ago you were looking for a good 'off the peg' investment strategy for a small sum, describing yourself as a newbie who hadn't invested before and looking for something that will protect against a bear market, inflation and volatility. You had considered global multi-asset funds from a couple of providers Vanguard and L&G, and noted that if you were to put your own portfolio together it would have to be something simple and passive because you were a novice.  Your thread didn't get any replies, but there are loads of threads here from newbies talking about off the shelf portfolios for small amounts of money and it probably got lost in the noise (especially as there were a number of 'how do I protect my investments from a bear market' threads cropping up at that time).

Then less than six weeks later from the post about your wanting to buy a simple off the peg investment portfolio fund, you were back with your question about how to find out whether the shares you wanted to buy were available on a platform before you opened your account, giving examples of things you were / might be interested in - such as Amazon, Poundland and an offshore Asian managed fund.  These are strange choices for someone who is an investment newbie and has recently said they were looking for a simple and passive investment, whether we are pre-crash or post-crash or - as at the moment - mid-crash.

Badger's comment might have been a bit blunt but her observation seemed on point - that the message for you to take away was that individual share investments can be a great deal of work, and you've been told before that it wasn't an easy or good way to invest as a newbie, and she wondered what happened to your idea of only 5.5 weeks ago of investing in an off the shelf global or mixed asset fund.

Your response to that was to be surprised - that you didn't identify as a person who had been told those things or had previously considered investing in a global or mixed asset fund, and thought you might have been mixed up with someone else, as nobody had advised you what Badger claimed.  Yet it seems pretty evident to me, at least from reading between the lines on what you have said and what others had said in reply.

But to be fair we have a lot of investment discussion here and so will sometimes know exactly what everyone is meaning and why, without the words seeming 100% explicit to a newbie who has not hung around for very long.  

The shorter answer is that of course you don't need to give up on investing in individual companies or finding out if individual specialist funds are available. However, the time and effort required to properly research how to construct a decent portfolio out of building blocks such as Poundland and Amazon or individual specialist regional managed funds across all types of investment assets, seems like a heck of a lot of work. Funds which already have a strategy of investing in a mix of assets are widely available and many fund platforms let you use their basic search or filtering tools to see if they offer a particular fund, even if you don't have an account yet on that platform  E.g. https://www.youinvest.co.uk/research-tools/quickrank/fund, https://www.youinvest.co.uk/research-tools/screener/fund or https://www.hl.co.uk/funds or https://www.investments.halifax.co.uk/funds-centre/ (note Halifax and their sister brand IWeb are currently closed to new customer applications due to the Covid mess). 

For individual companies you can generally assume if they are trading on the main UK or US exchanges you will be able to buy them from most mainstream stockbrokers or investment platforms, although it is sometimes more expensive to trade foreign shares. Once you have narrowed down what platform/broker to use for your ISA, you could always drop them an email to ask if something specific is available. 

Some platform comparisons linked here:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5583030/coolly-comparing-investment-platform-charges-snowmans-spreadsheet/p1

_ 
As an aside, UU share price was 956p on that day you enquired about buying it in your ISA just over four years ago, and fell over 30% within the next 25 months, and is still 9% lower than the 956p today. Although it has been paying dividends along the way so you would be mildly in profit overall had you bought at the time and reinvested the dividends at low prices, but even by doing that you'd only be in profit by about 10% before the S&S ISA charges ; so overall, given the potential risks, not any better than if you had kept the money in the top cash ISA available for the last 4 years instead.

Meanwhile an investment across thousands of worldwide companies via Vanguard's "LifeStrategy 100% equity" fund returned +46%, and their less volatile '60% equity / 40% bonds' version in the same product range returned +34%.