Investing in Gilts

hansi

Mrs Hansi and I were in our local HSBC today to move some money around and the advisor mentioned investing in gilts/corporate bonds under an ISA wrapper. She showed us the companies they were using which included such names as Gartmore, Invesco and other well known names. She sounded fairly convincing about the investment into which I was thinking of ploughing 10k but the initial charge of 4% seemed high. Are these investments kosher, and could I do better on the charges?

dunstonh

You can do better on charges and you can do better than getting advice from HSBC.

Gilts, corp bonds, fixed interest and commercial property all fall under the low risk category and are available as ISAs (commericial property from April 2006).

There are no guarantees with but they have low volatility. Hopefully, you would have been shown the performance highlighting the good and bad times rather than just the good times and then you could decide whether the volatility is within your tolerance.

As for being kosher, HSBC are regulated and can only sell UK authorised products. However, never buy you products from a bank.