Interactive Investor

Anyone use ii for either SIPP or ISA? Looking at them for a SIPP, its a big choice, so just after a few real world user reviews really.

Aiming for a few hundred a month, mostly invested into UK shares.

I use them, seem good and cost wise they are very good value. I have a trading account and ISA. Easy to use website and control panel and always helpful when I have phoned them up. Recommended.

If you trade frequently you get a discount to £5 a trade.

I use Hargreaves Lansdown for my SIPP / ISAs. Very easy to manage everything through their website.

It partly comes down to how much you are going to have invested regarding the cost. Interactive Investorcosts £20 a quarter but that gives you 2 free trades (£10 each)which it sound like you will be using any way. if you link you account to your partners you only pay one charge. The more you have with Interactive Investor the cheaper it gets compared to other platforms.

Yea, I have ISA with HL. Agree very easy to manage etc. I’m looking at ii, as the charges for what I’m aiming to do will be considerably less. Then would move the ISA at some point to, for even more cost saving.

Dobbo, do you ever get any of the free share trade days? It says they sometimes have days with free trades, but no other info. Not that I’d be relying on them, just interested.

Cant say I’ve ever noticed or used free trade days! If you transfer your ISA you get an amount of credit towards trades.

HL have come under criticism lately for there charges under the new regulations regarding charges (RDR).

I like the way the charges are shared between the ISA and SIPP too.

HL is fantastic in many ways, good info, easy to use etc, but not sure its gives that good vfm.

I don’t move my money around much, just buy into funds for the long term, so I’m not really fussed about a few £ here or there per trade.

Ah, Dobbo, do you have SIPP with them? If my understanding is right, they charge £20 quarterly for having an account (with £20 free trades), but then charge an additional £96/yr to have a SIPP. Is that right?

I don’t have a SIPP with them but I might move my company one to them, it’s just getting the time to sit down and do it!! It all depends how much you have as they tend to do a fixed fee rather than a % management charge I think.

With my trading account & ISA I pay £80 a year (giving me 8 free trades) but I also get my partners trading account & ISA for free. Essentially making it £40 a year each of us. Others like HL, Fidelity etc. have a management fee i.e 0.45% this can add up if you have a decent amount in your account.

Pros and Cons of different providers..

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/pensions/article-1712426/How-cheapest-low-cost-Sipp.html

That is from 2011, a lot has changed regarding fees since then!
There’s a chart that showns how the fees add up compared to what you have in you account, you can see then where the thresholds are between companies.

Tables: cheapest fund supermarkets for Isa investing

Hmm maybe I should move my share ISAs away from HL, looks like they’re not that cheap….

I use equinity, probably not the cheapest but be careful of the cheapies as its your pension gone if they go bust on you.

Anyone investing directly into high yielding shares here?

Anyone investing directly into high yielding shares here?

A mixture, some direct stocks but mainly funds.

Another platform to consider maybe Trustnet Direct as the website is so good for info, I think they may be linked to Interactive Investor. Quite a few brokers/platforms are linked these days. Cavendish use FundsNetwork which is Fidelity but are like a 3rd party broker with charges, i don’t know how RDR has affected this.

I have some FTSE 250 stocks. The only income fund I have at the moment is Trojan Income, I might get some of Invesco Perpetual High Income or some of Neil Woodfords new fund when the markets settle a bit.

footflaps – how are your direct investments performing v the funds? My direct investment portfolio looks just like Neil Woodfords income fund but I diy ed it, I really enjoy the monitoring/divi reinvesting etc.

I’m in year 2 now – averaging about 7-8% which I am more than happy with.

Diversification comes at a price – I have some real winners (Smith & Nephew, Nat Grid) & some sad losers (Centrica, Sainsburys) in there…..sometimes I think its a recovery fund!

footflaps – how are your direct investments performing v the funds? My direct investment portfolio looks just like Neil Woodfords income fund but I diy ed it, I really enjoy the monitoring/divi reinvesting etc.

All too soon to say really, I’ve only been migrating Cash ISAs to stocks in the last 6-12 months as they all matured. I’ve put a chunk into Woodfords new fund, but again need to wait a couple of years to see what happens…

I’m using ISAs as a supplement to pension (SIPP and company), so it’s a fairly long term view (25 years).

7-8% pretty good poolman, though as you say early days.

Migration can be costly footflaps. That’s why I’m trying to get the SIPP started in the right place.