About to invest in S&S ISA for the first time!

Cruixer wrote: »

In a previous post Vanguard lifestrategy was recommended, and I think the 60% equity fund is probably about right. I had previous been looking at the MSE recommended Iweb platform, but I noticed that Vanguard seem to offer their own LifeStrategy ready made ISA direct.

IWeb is pretty much cheap as chips, charging a nominal amount for account maintenance and a transaction fee every time they do something for you like buy or sell an investment in a fund or company. They have a broad range of funds.

Vanguard charge on a percentage basis for use of their platform and only have their own products on it. 0.15% is £15 per year per £10k-worth of investments, but they don't charge transaction fees to buy or sell the investments; if the two of you end up with £20k plus in the account you will be spending £30+ a year each in fees which might be more than just using IWeb if you are only doing a couple of purchases each year.

Generally the more you have invested and the less frequently you want to buy or sell any investments, the more sensible it is to use a provider with fixed or transaction based fees.

Another question is whether there is any reason why it would be better to purchase a Vangaurd fund through IWeb rather than going direct?

If two providers have same ballpark fees and the exact same services, go with the one that has a broader range of investments, because, why restrict yourself? Saves messing around and being forced to transfer out if you later prefer a different product that's not offered by the one with the restricted range.

And finally, what I suspect is an unanswerable question but I am interested in views, is now the right time to invest? Putting aside personal views ...

Correct, it's an unanswerable question and only in hindsight will you know what was the exact best time for you to have invested in your global portfolio of stocks and bonds.

You can't ask for personal opinion on a forum 'putting aside personal views'. Objectively, the markets are at a fair price based on how the sum total of market participants have valued the hundred trillion of global equities and bonds that exist. Any suggestion that the price might move to a specific different price tomorrow *must* be a personal view, as if it were a view that everyone else shared, the people would have already bought or sold accordingly to move the price to that level.

my impression is that uncertainty tends to send markets into a flutter.

Sometimes markets fluctuate more than other times. Uncertainty and fear help you buy things cheaper than if everyone was happy. There is always 'the next thing' ready to send markets into another flutter.

Practically, you are proposing to buy a globally diversified pool of assets. Brexit is not the main driver of the price of an oil company or US retailer or Chinese software company or Korean smartphone manufacturer. However, the value of those overseas stocks measured in pounds sterling will depend on how much of other currencies a pound sterling will buy. It's generally expected that if Brexit doesn't happen or goes smoother than expected, pounds will become more valuable so your overseas assets will be worth fewer pounds . If Brexit goes badly (ie more badly than the market makers already project) there will be less demand for pounds and then your overseas stocks will be worth more pounds (as happened immediately after the last referendum result).

And you don't know what direction or timescale it will be (especially "putting aside personal views" and trying to look for facts).

Should this have any impact on my decision whether to do this now or wait?

You have more cash than you need and you are generating more each year. Ultimately you want to have a good chunk of this cash in the form of investments for a better long term outcome than holding cash which gets eroded by inflation. So the question is just when to switch from being a cash hoarder to an investor. "I won't do it now because markets might go up or down soon" seems a silly answer because markets always might go up or down soon. That's been their status every day for the last hundred years.

What you might think is:
Wife and I might like to have £30k in investments each in a year or so.

We could do £10k each right now (and fill the rest of this year's allowance with a simple cash ISA product).

We could do another £10k each next tax year, in a couple of months, along with another couple of cash ISAs

Towards the the end of next tax year while taking stock of your situation, one or both of you could transfer part or all of your cash ISAs into investment ISAs.

Then you will be able to say you didn't completely dive in before 'Brexit deadline day at end of March', nor did you completely dive in during June, nor did you wait until spring 2020. You bought at a variety of prices, which seems like a risk averse thing to do. Of course, nobody can tell you if those variety of prices will on average be higher or lower than if you just dived in today.

You may be of the opinion that you could have been investing monthly in S&S ISAs for the last couple of decades and have already missed out on some growth, so why wait any longer. Statistically, investing all the money you can afford as soon as you are able, generally gets more growth than investing slowly by drip feeding at a variety of prices while markets go up without you. But for an individual case over an indeterminate timeline, nobody can really tell you how it will shake out.

In terms of the actual investing:

-what fund is the best for me?
- where is the cheapest place to buy it?

Are the two questions to ask yourself, in that order. If you have heard of Lifestrategy 60% equities, you have probably heard of its rivals, on the threads where people talk about alternatives to that particular Vanguard range of funds and the various pros and cons.