Stocks and shares

PaulDesmond

This is a savings section and I need to talk about stocks and shares.

ColdIron

It's a Savings and Investments board

PaulDesmond

Ok. 

Having watched Martin last night on stocks and shares, I have had a look. I looked at stocks and shares ISA with Hargreaves but I do not know what the portfolio is. Is it American and UK or only UK? It would be nice if they gave a typical portfolio or a recent graph to show what is currently going on. As I have never done this before I could do with help. Yearly fees if they exist. Will dividends be paid back to me or re-invested. Seem like everything is done for you so you don’t need to know anything.

Ayr_Rage

PaulDesmond said:

Ok. 

Having watched Martin last night on stocks and shares, I have had a look. I looked at stocks and shares ISA with Hargreaves but I do not know what the portfolio is. Is it American and UK or only UK? It would be nice if they gave a typical portfolio or a recent graph to show what is currently going on. As I have never done this before I could do with help. Yearly fees if they exist. Will dividends be paid back to me or re-invested. Seem like everything is done for you so you don’t need to know anything.

You open an account.

You decide what you wish to invest in, there is absolutely no typical portfolio.

Fees will be documented on the provider's website and may vary by investment too.

Dividends can be reinvested, held in cash awaiting your decision as to what to do or paid out, all up to you.

Honestly, you need to do a lot more research to know what you are getting into.

FrugaiMacDugal

This help page might answer some of your queries.

dunstonh

 Is it American and UK or only UK?

Are you talking about what you already have or what you are looking to buy?

 It would be nice if they gave a typical portfolio or a recent graph to show what is currently going on.

Whole of market platforms have over 30,000 investment options and a near infinite number of combinations.  There is no such thing as typical.    However, there are multi-asset funds available that contain the various areas and performance data can be seen on those.

Will dividends be paid back to me or re-invested. 

either or.

Seem like everything is done for you so you don’t need to know anything.

On whole of market platforms, you do the investment selections.   Maybe its better for you to start on something simpler, such as robo providers who only offer a handful of pre-built portfolios.   All you need to do with them is select the risk.

Woodstok2000

The easiest way to think about it is that the ISA is just a tax-shield, within which you can do anything you could do already in the market but with the additional benefit of not paying tax on any income.

With most stocks and shares ISAs you can invest in almost anything (funds, UK and overseas shares, investment trusts, bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and more).  HL offer 'do-it-yourself' options where you can decide exactly what to buy, and also a bunch of ready-made investments that have been put together by their analysts so you can select a fully managed portfolio based on your risk appetite.  You can even mix these two approaches and invest some yourself and some in pre-packaged investments within the ISA.

For that reason, it's impossible to provide a typical portfolio or general performance graph.  For example, if you'd invested 1 year ago in a fund that tracked the FTSE 100, you'd have made 20% returns.  NASDAQ would be about the same, but the NIKKEI would have returned about 30%, and buying NVIDIA shares would have made 40% returns.  On the flip side, buying Diageo shares would have lost you 30% of your investment.  You should be able to see typical historical performance for shares, funds, investment portfolios etc within the HL website.

If you buy shares that pay dividends, those will be paid to you and you can decide whether to take the cash, hold the cash in the ISA (if allowed) or reinvest them.

Fees will vary - HL will charge you about 0.45% per year for the ISA.  On top of that there will be fees for dealing shares and ETFs, and there will be annual management fees for funds or other managed investments.

ColdIron

Cash and investments are very different things, one is not a replacement for the other

For five years or less stick to cash. Investments are only suitable for the long term, five years (minimum), better for 10, 20 etc, like your pension

eskbanker

PaulDesmond said:

Having watched Martin last night on stocks and shares, I have had a look. I looked at stocks and shares ISA with Hargreaves but I do not know what the portfolio is. Is it American and UK or only UK? It would be nice if they gave a typical portfolio or a recent graph to show what is currently going on. As I have never done this before I could do with help. Yearly fees if they exist. Will dividends be paid back to me or re-invested. Seem like everything is done for you so you don’t need to know anything.

There's plenty of material on this site (and plenty of others) offering guidance to investment beginners, so if he didn't signpost viewers towards it then pages like these should be somewhere to start your research with the basics:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/investment-beginners/
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/stocks-shares-isas/

Alexland

Also HL is considered on this forum to be a very expensive platform for most scenarios.

For modest amounts you may find it both cheaper and easier to use a simple low cost platform with less investment choice such as Dodl which an app run by AJ Bell an established FTSE250 company.

https://dodl.co.uk/investment-isa

Once you have opened the ISA account they have their own funds aimed at different risk levels

https://dodl.co.uk/investments/funds

Or for slightly lower cost you can buy Vanguard Lifestrategy funds aimed at different risk levels

https://dodl.co.uk/investments/themed (then click All-in-one)

poseidon1

OP I have had a good look at some of your past posts on ISA and general cash savings matters, and have to conclude you don't appear to have yet acquired the kind of knowledge base and understanding necessary to take on investing in  stockmarket assets until your understanding of the basics of saving and investing improves markedly.

The recent post below where you did not appreciate quite how the tax free nature of ISAs actually worked ( despite having chosen to save in that wrapper) was a little concerning:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6620407/year-fixed-isa#latest

However your proactive journey into the world of different cash saving possibilities seem to have commenced last year, but as evident in this year's post no great increase in your comprehension of these matters :

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6547374/hsbc-savings#latest

I appreciate your desire is merely to handover cash to an Investment platform manager, let them make all the decisions and passively sit back and await dividends and interest to roll in.

Although this is possible, since HL  ( for example) do operate model portfolio funds for those who do not have the knowledge or inclination, you do need to have some basic understanding of what you are looking to achieve by investing and how the portfolio fund you chose might achieve your objectives.

In any event if you do go down the investing route, definitely do so via a stocks and shares ISA, rather than a general investment account, since you will likely struggle with the HMRC record keeping and tax compliance necessary for annual income tax reporting and future capital gains calculations.

Hopefully other posters to this thread will take your background  into account with regard to subsequent advice.