Lindsell Train on iWeb

Alexland wrote: »

I am not sure if HL have any funds discounted greater than their platform fee but it certainly helps especially if you have other reasons to be with HL such as the limited choice in the LISA market.

ColdIron wrote: »

That's right, in this case HL have the D class that CSD does not (B class only) and the saving is the same as the extra platform fee. For many other funds this won't be true

Sometimes HL get access to cheaper classes because of their size so the OCF taken from within the fund is lower. For other funds where there is no cheaper class available sometimes they simply discount the OCF by providing a 'loyalty bonus' which is provided as cash. This cash must be spent by reinvesting in the same or a different fund. It can't be used to pay fees or withdraw. The effect is the same to you

With some funds, such as the Woodford ones, they have a mixture of discounted classes and a loyalty bonus

Alexland wrote: »

Yes but for a vanilla S&S ISA they are unikely to be overwhelmingly competitive compared to others.

Start off by deciding what you want to invest in then decide which platform to use.

Alex

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Maybe the app and website at CSD are not as good as HL's. I haven't been a user of CSD's site except out of idle curiosity for what funds they carry, and never used their app.

However, presumably when you want to make a purchase at CSD of a fund that you want, you search for it and press buy for £x,xxx. And when you want to reduce your holding, you search for the fund or click on it in your portfolio list and press sell for £y,yyy. Most of the rest of the year, you simply own the fund and don't even need to load the website or app.

To choose to use HL as your service provider because of a prettier website or an app with a few more features - I don't know what if any the real functional differences are, but I know the CSD app does allow fund trading these days and has a 4 star rating on the android store which is no worse than HL's - is an okay decision if the services are the same price.

However, the services are not the same price; you're going to invest in funds and HL charge 0.2% more per year for holding funds. Closer to half a percent a year of your assets, than the quarter percent that CSD charge. Some would suggest it's somewhat irrational to wave goodbye to 0.2% of all your assets every single year just so that when you click buy or sell on the app or website, a few times a year, the interface is prettier. If you like the HL website for its research features and advertorial, you can still use those features without being a customer logged in. Although you can get (better) research features at Trustnet or Morningstar.

As you know from some of the comments upthread, HL discount *some* funds, so that the total cost is in some cases no worse than buying them from a more 'normal priced' provider. But that only applies to particular funds that HL choose to promote and support, and will in most cases not cover the difference in platform fee, even if it does happen to cover the difference in the case of the LT fund.

You would be irrational to restrict your investment choices to the particular funds that HL choose to promote from time to time. So it's inevitable that HL will end up more expensive overall, even if the discounts make some funds more palatable and the full 0.2% might not be felt on all of your portfolio, only part of it.

Remember that an extra 0.2% a year on £50k holding is £100. After a decade, that's a thousand quid, even assuming no growth at all in the value of your assets. Could you do something better with a thousand quid that makes up for having to use a slightly less pretty smartphone app?

Maybe you don't have £50k+ invested - but presumably you aspire for your investments to grow. Using the more expensive provider at an extra 0.2% a year, it's like every tenner you invest really costs you £10.20 in the first year... and you're throwing a further 20p in the bin each and every year on every tenner's worth of value you hold for that respective year.