Should I have different funds?

Cruixer

Albermarle said:

OK all looks good. I asked the question as we often have posters who ask about investing and savings and totally ignore their pension. Regarding income in retirement this might be of interest.
Home - PLSA - Retirement Living Standards

I understand, that was probably me until a few years ago with regards to the pension, I was just fortunate that the company I have been with since 2009 has a DB element to the pension, but that was more coincidence than anything that I planned. My focus was always on paying off the mortgage, and since then I have turned my attention to the S&S ISA and pension top up.

That is a brilliant site, thanks. I agree with Geoff that the figures are probably extreme, but then it has been designed for the reality that a lot of people don't know how to budget well or get value for money. I feel that I live comfortably, and the two of us with one child, at least one overseas holiday per year, and my wife flying home to visit her folks every couple of months don't spend more than about £35k in a year. Having said that, I do nearly all of the house maintenance and improvements myself and we are typical MSE types, never paying over the odds for anything!

The good thing about that site is that it has a lot more detail than most sites, which just give you the value for comfortable, moderate etc. You can actually download the spreadsheets they used to calculate and see how closely the figures match to your lifestyle etc, and modify in the spreadsheet if so inclined!

Cruixer

Albermarle said:

You have up  to £85K protection for the platform. However your money is in the investment fund, so even if the platform went bust, you would not lose that money. Then you have another £85K protection per fund house ( Vanguard in your case)
As LLoyds is a bank then in theory they could go bust, but would almost certainly be taken over by the Government or another bank. No doubt a bigger platform would be happy to snap up IWebs customers.
Vanguard is not a bank, and is one of the largest investment providers in the world. If it was to go bust, most likely we would be in some kind of global Armageddon/WW3 and probably you would not be worrying about LS 80 at that point.

Thanks, this is useful. I am already above the £85k limit for Vanguard, so maybe there is an argument for using another fund to spread the protection. However, I do see the point that if something as big as Vanguard was to fail, we'd be more focussed on hiding from the cannibals and mutants. That being said, if Enron can go bankrupt, surely Vanguard could?

GeoffTF

Albermarle said:
As LLoyds is a bank then in theory they could go bust, but would almost certainly be taken over by the Government or another bank. No doubt a bigger platform would be happy to snap up IWebs customers.

It is not at all clear that there is a larger UK platform:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Share_Dealing

Lloyds Bank is one of the most systemically important banks in the world. It is "too big to fail". Halifax Share Dealing Limited (HSDL) is presumably profitable. If Lloyds Bank did go bust HSDL could be floated on the stock exchange, bought out by another financial services provider, or indeed bought out by private equity, as Interactive Investor was. If HSDL went bust it would almost certainly be bailed out by Lloyds Bank, just as Seltrade was bailed out by its owner Société Générale. Your assets are required to be ring fenced, so they should be safe even if both Lloyds Bank and HSDL went bust. When small and dodgy brokers have gone bust in the past, and dipped their fingers into client assets, the FSCS has ensured that everyone with an account less than about a £million did not lose out, but they usually had to wait for their money.

wmb194

GeoffTF said:

Albermarle said:
As LLoyds is a bank then in theory they could go bust, but would almost certainly be taken over by the Government or another bank. No doubt a bigger platform would be happy to snap up IWebs customers.

It is not at all clear that there is a larger UK platform:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Share_Dealing

Lloyds Bank is one of the most systemically important banks in the world. It is "too big to fail". Halifax Share Dealing Limited (HSDL) is presumably profitable. If Lloyds Bank did go bust HSDL could be floated on the stock exchange, bought out by another financial services provider, or indeed bought out by private equity, as Interactive Investor was. If HSDL went bust it would almost certainly be bailed out by Lloyds Bank, just as Seltrade was bailed out by its owner Société Générale. Your assets are required to be ring fenced, so they should be safe even if both Lloyds Bank and HSDL went bust. When small and dodgy brokers have gone bust in the past, and dipped their fingers into client assets, the FSCS has ensured that everyone with an account less than about a £million did not lose out, but they usually had to wait for their money.

According to its 2021 accounts it made a net profit of £13.8m in that year. If it really has one million customers it's actually not very impressive: its profitability is not even close to CMC let alone Hargreaves Lansdown or AJ Bell.



https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03195646/filing-history

GeoffTF

If they do have 1 million customers, the revenue figure equates to about £45 per customer per annum. HSDL has recently changed their charges to get a minimum of £36 p.a. from their Halifax branded accounts, so perhaps they had a lot of inactive accounts. It is possible that HSDL is a big fish earning a small amount from each account.

dealyboy

Hello @Cruixer ...

To go back to your original question, you might want to explore HSBC Global Strategy Dynamic (Acc or Inc) as an alternative to VLS80, available on all good platforms.

It is a multi asset actively managed fund that operates without the UK bias with a predominantly risk-on weighting to achieve results in a 10 year time frame. Costs and performance are similar to VLS but that is not guaranteed of course.

Have a look at the factsheets and you will see that HSBC Global Strategy funds take a different approach to Vanguard LS ... https://www.trustnet.com/factsheets/o/g1hh/hsbc-global-strategy-dynamic-portfolio-c-acc

Cruixer

dealyboy said:

Hello @Cruixer ...

To go back to your original question, you might want to explore HSBC Global Strategy Dynamic (Acc or Inc) as an alternative to VLS80, available on all good platforms.

It is a multi asset actively managed fund that operates without the UK bias with a predominantly risk-on weighting to achieve results in a 10 year time frame. Costs and performance are similar to VLS but that is not guaranteed of course.

Have a look at the factsheets and you will see that HSBC Global Strategy funds take a different approach to Vanguard LS ... https://www.trustnet.com/factsheets/o/g1hh/hsbc-global-strategy-dynamic-portfolio-c-acc

Thanks for this recommendation. Unfortunately this fund does not appear to be available on Iweb.

There is one called 'HSBC FTSE All World Index C Acc' and this also appears to be in the moneyweek top 10 funds list that I mentioned before. Another two from that top 10 that are on Iweb are 'Fundsmith Equity' and 'Fidelity Index World P' and would be great to hear if anyone has any experience of these?

I realise it might be a bit simplistic to be looking at funds from the top 10 list, but as I don't have any detailed knowledge of this, it would seem better to pick from established, popular funds.

ColdIron

Cruixer said:

dealyboy said:

Hello @Cruixer ...

To go back to your original question, you might want to explore HSBC Global Strategy Dynamic (Acc or Inc) as an alternative to VLS80, available on all good platforms.

It is a multi asset actively managed fund that operates without the UK bias with a predominantly risk-on weighting to achieve results in a 10 year time frame. Costs and performance are similar to VLS but that is not guaranteed of course.

Have a look at the factsheets and you will see that HSBC Global Strategy funds take a different approach to Vanguard LS ... https://www.trustnet.com/factsheets/o/g1hh/hsbc-global-strategy-dynamic-portfolio-c-acc

Thanks for this recommendation. Unfortunately this fund does not appear to be available on Iweb.

It is available. Look in the Funds Centre. There are 5 portfolios. This is the Balanced one
https://www.markets.iweb-sharedealing.co.uk/funds-centre/fund-supermarket/detail/GB00B76WP695

dealyboy

... and I have it (Dynamic Acc version) on iWeb (S&S ISA) ... ISIN: GB00B849DT80.

iWeb search is not the best (bit like here ... shhh!) but ISINs work fine (tip: use trustnet to search).

Albermarle

There is one called 'HSBC FTSE All World Index C Acc' and this also appears to be in the moneyweek top 10 funds list that I mentioned before. Another two from that top 10 that are on Iweb are 'Fundsmith Equity' and 'Fidelity Index World P' and would be great to hear if anyone has any experience of these

These are all 100% equity funds, so will be a bit more volatile than the VLS80 or HSBC Global strategy dynamic.

Fundsmith is a managed fund, where the manager is using his knowledge to try and beat the markets. The other two are just global index trackers.