Opinions/Experience with Hargreaves Lansdown?

Chordeiles wrote: »

Last time I looked (earlier in 2017) Hargreaves Lansdown boasted of managing £70 billion for 876,000 clients. That makes their "average client" worth about £80,000.

O.k., so HL just published a new set of results, accompanied by a new boast of client numbers and funds under management. So it's time to revisit the above calculation.

HL now claim to be managing £86 billion for 1,015,000 clients. Thus the new "client worth" has risen to nearly £85,000. Didn't they do well ! But wait a minute, during the relevant period the stock market has risen by a lot more than that, so actually they are NOT GAINING ANY HIGHER VALUE CLIENTS. Which is exactly what one would expect from the iniquitous charging structure, of course.

Bear in mind these latest figures were compiled before the market wobbles of recent days. And also before they finally allowed nearly half-a-million of my own funds to transfer out !

Advice remains the same, HL will suit many investors just setting out, but for goodness sake be aware of how the charges grow as your portfolio grows !

DennisTenus wrote: »

Where did you transfer yours to?

Alliance Trust Savings. Bear in mind that I'm on the verge of drawdown so they were cheapest when drawdown charges taken into account. But Interactive Investor and IWEB are all in the same ball-park. A lifetime of poor experiences with the Halifax brand would have steered me away from IWEB, and when I started this process Interactive Investor had a "transfer in" fee for SIPPs, which although tiny left a niggling worry whether they really wanted my business !

If you look back up this thread you'll see that in my posts of 19th and 21st October 2017 I referred to Alliance Trust as "pretty rubbish", but in fact after a sticky start and a complaint they have subsequently been fantastic, proactively keeping me informed about what is going on and keeping Hargreaves Lansdown supplied with documents they seemed to have lost along the way. I hope to get around to posting a history of this transfer (251 days to complete !) in the thread "Hargreaves Lansdown transfer obstructions".

Now I'm with Alliance Trust I can say I really like their platform. I was never sure why folks enthused about the HL platform, I found plenty of annoyances there, with even more weird stuff as my SIPP transferred out, like the history disappearing before I could reconcile recent transactions (charges, dividends, loyalty bonuses etc.).

Chordeiles wrote: »

Now I'm with Alliance Trust I can say I really like their platform.

Well of course Interactive Investor had the last laugh. They bought Alliance Trust Savings so now I'm an Interactive Investor customer !
No complaints, transfer was well managed with plenty of information on how to use the new platform. And I like it even better than I liked ATS. But still sometimes I go back to Hargreaves Lansdown's website, not bacause I can't do what I want elsewhere, more out of sheer familiarity (and my ISA is still there. Note to self, time to move it - especially as Hargreaves Lansdown have bowed to the pressure to abandon exit fees).