Aegon SIPP -- Can't see any defence related funds

spoovy

dunstonh said:

spoovy said:

dunstonh said:

I have a SIPP with Aegon, and I'm looking to move some money into a defence related fund (Invesco Defence Innovation UCITS ET, VanEck Defense UCITS ETF A, etc).  There seems to be plenty of them in the wild, but the Aegon fund research tool doesn't list any at all.

Are you sure you have the Aegon SIPP and not their personal pensions or master trust scheme?

Yes it's definitely a SIPP, though there are several levels available, which each offering more granularity in investment choices, from very broad choice of "High risk", "medium risk" at the top level, to picking funds a level or two down, to picking individual company equities at the bottom level. They call it gating.  I'm wondering if I would have access to more funds (more risky perhaps) if I moved down a level.  I think there are seven gating levels IIRC but I'd need to look into this more.

The problem is that you can only move through the gating system in one direction, so once you're committed to picking individual stocks say, you can't go back to picking funds afterwards. 
I'm still learning about this though so my understanding is not great atm.

Interesting. I don't recognise the two Aegon SIPPs I have experience with (Aegon Cofunds and Aegon Retirement Choices).  I didn't realise that they had other versions.

I've just figured out that although I am on the ARC/ Aegon Retirement Choices platform, I also have access to Retireready too.  These are two completely different URLs, different login details etc, but my savings/funds etc show up the same in both.  It seems I can use either to add money, choose funds etc, but the "gating" comes from Retireready only,  with gating set in either platform, where there are 4 different "gates", with the top one, gate 4 being only available if I employ an advisor. 
It seems like they migrated people across from Retireready to ARC, but didn't close down the RR platform as some people were used to it.