Which ISA provider?

Chadsman

I have been paying in £500 per month into a shares ISA. Not knowing much about such things I picked my current account provider. It seems the favoured ISA provider of most people on MSE is Vanguard LifeStategy. What makes them so popular, is it just the lower charging structure, do they out perform others or...?

eskbanker

Chadsman said:

I have been paying in £500 per month into a shares ISA. Not knowing much about such things I picked my current account provider. It seems the favoured ISA provider of most people on MSE is Vanguard LifeStategy. What makes them so popular, is it just the lower charging structure, do they out perform others or...?

Vanguard's LifeStrategy is one of their investment product ranges, not an ISA provider as such.  Vanguard do have a platform, Vanguard Investor, but while it is relatively cheap, it only offers their own products, so is only suited to those who wish to restrict themselves to Vanguard investments.

Decide what investments you're interested in first, and only then consider which platform to hold them on....

NottinghamKnight

Chadsman said:

I have been paying in £500 per month into a shares ISA. Not knowing much about such things I picked my current account provider. It seems the favoured ISA provider of most people on MSE is Vanguard LifeStategy. What makes them so popular, is it just the lower charging structure, do they out perform others or...?

Well if you are with halifax that may not have been a bad decision, but not with  most others. vanguard have a platform and also funds that you can invest in, you can only invest in their funds on their platform but can invest in vanguard funds on other platforms, lifestrategy is a range of funds whereby you choose the mix of assets and has a uk bias, nothing wrong with that but there are similar options from other large providers such as fidelity, hsbc, blackrock and many pothers. 
You could start with reading the monevator website for some general information.  

Alexland

NottinghamKnight said:

Well if you are with halifax that may not have been a bad decision

Remember that Halifax push their Investment ISA (mostly Scottish Widows sub-funds with big UK bias) above their Share Dealing service...

https://www.halifax.co.uk/investing/start-investing/ready-made-investments.html