St James's Place Review

Seraphi

I've learned a lot on this forum about wealth and asset management companies. Common theme is to stay away from SJP. Here's a review by Yodelar explaining in detail as to why: https://www.yodelar.com/insights/st-jamess-place-review

Key points:

• High charges and poor performance from St. James's Place Wealth Management.
• Over 50% of SJP funds rank in the worst 25% of their sector over the last 5 years.
• Over 72% of SJP funds perform worse than the benchmark.
• The SJP UK High Income & other SJP funds rank as the worst in their sector.
• Highest initial and ongoing charges
• Restrictive exit penalties for clients wishing to leave
  

Posting in the hope that it is helpful to lurkers now and in future.

eskbanker

A noble thought but IMHO the sort of people who fall for the SJP sales pitch aren't generally the type who'd be researching on sites like this first!

ColdIron

While I am not going to champion SJP, far from it, I would not use them myself, it's worth putting a few things into perspective. They are a wealth management company so cannot be compared with a platform. They give regulated advice and this is not free. Since the Retail Distribution Review most advisors must make a transparent and explicit fee for that advice. As SJP provide their own funds they have chosen to retain the bundled charging structure

From memory, I'm not going to look it up again, for unit trusts (non pension?) they continue to use the Initial Charge model (that 5% fee they take from your first and all subsequent investments and could be an encouragement for 'churn') to pay for the advice. For pensions they use the tiered early exit charges to much the same end. In my view they were wrong to do this but I expect they know their business

I think it's fairer to describe their funds as average or mediocre rather than the worst, there are many that are worse. The annual charges are certainly towards the top of those commonly found. If I recall the UK High Income fund was managed by Woodford until they sacked him. However they did mandate that he used FTSE 350 companies so it was never gated in the same way that Wooodford Equity Income was, as it wasn't awash with illiquid and unlisted investments that had no place in an equity income fund. Arguably they served their clients better than Hargreaves Lansdown who pushed WEI until the day it was shuttered

I think with SJP a lot comes down to how well you gel with your partner (or tied salesman). A good friend has been with them for over a decade and has received quite a bit of help that was not charged for or sold anything. He professes to be happy with the performance so far, though has done little in the way of comparisons. Since that partner has retired and he has already paid all the initial charges and is also past the 6 year pension exit fee period he is content to leave things as they are but has stopped contributing any more money to them. All his future ISA contributions will be with a Self Select (non advised) retail platform

As I say I am not championing SJP, just clarifying their charging structure. I would not advise anyone I know to use them, but some find them 'reassuringly expensive'. However the choice should be

1. If you can, DIY
2. If you can't or have no inclination to, use an Independent Financial Advisor

UncleK

The case for the defence, m'lud..........?

Alexland

UncleK said:

The case for the defence, m'lud..........?

Says more about HL customer destructive trading choices and patterns than SJP being any good. Here is an article about the stuff HL clients have been investing in (including a few that are popular with some on this forum):

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-8930335/Bestselling-investment-funds-65s-revealed.html

From the original link... "Not only were HL Sipp investors outperformed by advised clients on average but they would have done better if had they bought a simple tracker fund on the HL platform and held it without any trading". They would have done even better with the tracker if they had reduced their platform costs..