How to move money from cash ISA into the stock market

FinancialIdiot

masonic said:

Historically, the difference has not been significant, but the UK market has consistently underperformed the global index as a whole, so a passive fund with a UK overweight will have had a tendency to have underperformed one that does not. But it isn't that simple, as there will be other differences between those funds which may reduce or even overcome that deficiency.

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As to the downsides of holding too many funds, there are a few:

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For the sorts of portfolios I've been talking about I thought the 'internal workings' were taken care of for you. You just pay a flat fee and the portfolio sits in your ISA doing what it does without your further involvement (other than to check its performance periodically). So as I understood it there's no extra cost or effort (to the investor) in having both portfolios in an ISA compared to having just one, right?

Anyway, it sounds (from what you're saying) as if, on balance, you would favour choosing the non-home-biased (i.e. HSBC) portfolio rather than the home-biased Vanguard one when choosing between them?

masonic

FinancialIdiot said:

For the sorts of portfolios I've been talking about I thought the 'internal workings' were taken care of for you. You just pay a flat fee and the portfolio sits in your ISA doing what it does without your further involvement (other than to check its performance periodically). So as I understood it there's no extra cost or effort (to the investor) in having both portfolios in an ISA compared to having just one, right?

That's correct if you buy just one fund. If you spread your money around multiple funds and the performance of those fund is different, you would need to rebalance your portfolio back to its target allocations from time to time, which is additional effort over a single fund solution, and potentially additional cost.

FinancialIdiot said:

Anyway, it sounds (from what you're saying) as if, on balance, you would favour choosing the non-home-biased (i.e. HSBC) portfolio rather than the home-biased Vanguard one when choosing between them?

I don't have a strong view on home bias. My portfolio has no home bias. If you decide to go with a fund that has home bias, I think you should have a reason for choosing it over the more natural, global, allocation.