share dealing account advice

At the moment i am looking to do 1-3 trades per months with values from £50-£100 per trade

X-o are very reputable, used by many here for investments either inside or outside an ISA.

Compared to HL and other rivals, they won't let you buy open ended investment funds, they won't let you trade on foreign markets and they don't have a 'regular investing' feature to let you invest consistently each month by direct debit for a discounted £1-2 per purchase.

However, if you're not looking for any of that and just want to do ad hoc buys and sells of UK listed companies, they're fine.

Single trades of £50 a time is crazy expensive though, however you do it. Imagine if you buy 50 shares at £1 each for £50. Plus half a percent stamp duty is £50.25 total. Plus one of the cheapest deal fees in the market at £5.95, you're up to £56.20 of expenditure.

Now consider that when you sell the shares it will cost you another £5.95. So to get £56.20 worth of cash back in your hand, you need to be able to sell the shares for £62.15 to be able to pay the £5.95 sale fee and get £56.20 that you started with, net of fees back in your account.

How does the company have to perform to allow you to turn the 50 shares from being worth only £50 total when you buy them, to be worth £62.15 when you sell them? The share price has to grow to £1.243 per share so that the whole lot will be worth £62.15.

So basically when you buy only £50 of shares at a time you are betting that this company will increase in value by over 24% just to let you get out without losing money. Let alone actually making a profit to reward you for the high risk you were taking by buying into an individual company that could lose half its value overnight.

Over the long term a company might grow (including share price growth and dividends) at 8% a year annualised. So, if the company does well, after three years you might be 25% up. But as you have a hurdle of over 24% just to get back up to break even, you need a very long time or a LOT of good fortune to overcome the hurdle and actually make money.

Try investing with minimums of £1000 per company instead, as paying £6 of fees for every £50 you invest (even ignoring stamp duty and eventual selling cost) will financially cripple your trading strategy - even if six quid doesn't seem like a lot.