Recommend me a Stocks & Shares ISA

Got an AJBell one, need to open another.
Had a quick look at HargreavesL and the fees looked quite high.

Anyone got any recommendations?

Cheers

What do you need from it? Do you want to invest in individual stocks or any specific funds etc…?

Why do you need another one? You can just carry on paying into the one you’ve got up to the max 20k pa (but only pay into one each year). The Isa is just the wrapper for the fujds/shares you’ve invested in so you can choose different investments this year as long as aj bell support them with their Isa.

Vanguard is pretty decent. They have a range of fund options with ok fees. Just their own products but they seem to do ok

Depends what you invest in – market trackers…? Likely Vanguard. If you select investments HL is expensive for unit trusts but cheaper for direct shares.

Why do you need another one?

Erm, eggs and baskets.

What do you need from it? Do you want to invest in individual stocks or any specific funds etc…?

Was thinking of shares and funds, but I guess I could do the shares in the one I already have…
Will have a look at Vanguard. If nothing else it’ll stop me gambling and buying dross like Cineworld, Amigo, INTU etc

Another vote for Vanguard, I also have one with Moneybox.

I have HL ISA and Vanguard general savings. Both platforms seem ok to me.

HL have just dropped the £1.50 fee** per stock to £zero on the regular DD savings, money taken 7-8th month and invested 10th-12th. **ftse100-250 stocks.
also dividend reinvestments are free (used to be a £1.50 fee)

£13 a trade, or £9 in following month if you make 12+ trades in calendar month.

cheaper options out their, but you don’t always get the bid-offer spread, as with HL the trade is instant.
On the really cheaper options i looked at, you are effectively placing an order at best, they may bulk orders togeather and hence you arent buying for the price at the time of order placement. ie you place order 9am, it’ll likely be dealth in a few mins, butit could be dealt at 3pm that day, the price has moved.

the HL app has got better in the last year, more functionality, although its lost the broker recommendations info that it had a few years ago.

ps. i laways thought stocks and shares were ring fenced in client accounts,
hence you are covered. a quick google.

What happens to my ISA if the company goes bust?
If you hold a fund and the fund manager goes bust, then the underlying assets are protected. The stocks owned by that fund are held separately by a trustee or a depositary, so if the fund manager goes under, the investments in the fund remain

Daft related question. I want to move my employer shares (share save & match) into an ISA to protect the dividend yields from tax which I want to take as income when I retire. Is it a case of selling them in/from computershare/equateplus and then rebuying them in the new S&S ISA? ta.

@juanking, you’d be best to set up a regular account (no mgt fee) and an isa,
for example on HL, you could deposit the shares in the regular account and then they will do a sell/buy back into the ISA for £12.95 fee, max £20k on isa per annum

Invest engine if you don’t mind restricting yourself to ETF’s. Its free.

ps. i laways thought stocks and shares were ring fenced in client accounts,
hence you are covered. a quick google.

What happens to my ISA if the company goes bust?
If you hold a fund and the fund manager goes bust, then the underlying assets are protected. The stocks owned by that fund are held separately by a trustee or a depositary, so if the fund manager goes under, the investments in the fund remain

This is the thread I opened on that a while ago. The upshot of it is me now opening a separate ISA on the basis that it protects me slightly more. (Though the the outcome of that thread was clear as mud.)

Do I need to consider FSCS limits for my shares ISA?

Looked 8nto Vanguard. Saw this page…

Looks good. Really like the bit about no hidden fees

No hidden charges
No charge to buy or sell funds, or make payments

Then see this bit…

Ah so there are no charges to buy or sell funds, but there are to hold them. But Vanguard don’t put that on the main page.

I recall someone saying anything approaching .5% was too much on a pension, so presume the same applies here.

Wasn’t the recieved wisdom that trackers are generally better than charged for managed funds.

So where can I get some low cost trackers in an ISA?

I wouldn’t call that a “hidden fee”. All funds have some kind of fee and they are different for each fund. I think Vanguard have some around 0.1% which is about as low as they get, and TBH your fund should be making a reasonable return that renders these figures pretty moot. My Fundsmith has a higher fee but its up around 80% so I’ll live with that.

Interactive Investor is a great platform with low fees, although it’s a flat monthly charge which makes it much cheaper in relative terms if you have a higher amount invested. Vanguard is cheaper for anything up to about £40,000 or so I think. But the advantage of II is you can access the whole market, including Vanguard. So bizarrely if for instance you have a Vanguard Pension, provided it’s worth a reasonable amount you can invest it into a Vanguard Target Retirement fund for less than it costs to invest directly with Vanguard if you do it through II.
Since changing from vanguard to II I have (early days yet) managed to beat the returns I’m getting on Vanguard by about 2% in 4 months, just by investing in worldwide and US tracker funds from a variety of sources like HSBC, Vanguard, Fidelity, Aviva, Royal London and Polar Capital.

looking at vanguard, as i thought
https://support.vanguard.com/tutorials/buy-etf-or-stock

you aren’t buying the stock instantly. it goes into the queue and stays at pending till executed.
I’ll pay the higher fee to get the actual quote there and then and ‘place deal’

@andylc

Stoopid question, please could you confirm the ii website url?

Just to be sure I’m not going mad

I’ve been using Halifax for a while. When I opened the account it was very cheap for regular investments.

https://www.ii.co.uk/

Early days yet but my self chosen Pension funds are out-performing my Scottish Widows workplace pension and my Vanguard 80% Lifestrategy fund by more than 2% in 5 months. It does get a bit obsessive checking every day though…
I would move my ISA too but the monthly fees work out a bit higher until it’s worth a bit more.

Ta.

Weirdly enough when I tried to register it said I already was. Very very weird until I phoned customer service and they told me they had taken over an old trading account of mine from RBS 17 years ago.
An account I was trying to forget about as I lost absolutely everything on one shit trade :’)

Oh well, inauspicious start is not necessarily an augur

Better luck this time! I’m still trying to decide whether to open a combined SIPP and Trading account and start buying some random stocks – my pension I’ve just gone with various global and US tracker funds as I’m too clueless to go spending too much on specific shares. Would only in effect cost £40 extra per year but I might end up tinkering too much and wasting my money…

Trading 212

Pretty much fee free compared to HL and AJ Bell..

I’ve found it quite easy to make money on there compared to AJ Bell where you need to drop seven or eight hundred per trade (stocks) to make it worthwhile.

That sounds a good shout. Might move my ISA there.

Given the new 2024 ISA rules that allow you to have 2 ISAs of the same type in a tax year, has anyone got a current recommendation for a 2nd S&S ISA to go alongside my Vanguard one?

I want to spread the risk across 2 and if the 2nd outperforms the Vanguard I want to be able to transfer to it but not affect this year’s contributions.

“Why do you need another one? You can just carry on paying into the one you’ve got up to the max 20k pa (but only pay into one each year). ”

In the eggs and baskets question I suppose if ISA funds have the same £85k investor protection limit that banks have then splitting ISAs between different places wouldn’t do any harm if your total funds were bigger than £85k.

Have a look on Fidelity?

Sorry for he hijack – can I transfer more than one old ISAs into a current one without losing my £20k allowance for the year?

I thought Fidelity owned Vanguard??

@Kryton57 – you often can. I transferred old ISA into Vanguard S&S a few years ago.

@irc – that is another factor. Avoiding all eggs in 1 basket and hoping for future growth

@ElShalimo they’re two separate companies.

Thanks

Krypton – yes, the 20k limit is only on new money invested. You can transfer other ISAs unlimited.

I use Trading 212 for my isa now. No platform fees and Forex rates very good.

2 cheapest platforms I’m aware of are Trading212 and InvestEngine. Both are really good, I went with the latter as too confused by the endless share options on 212.

How are you getting on Invest Engine?

It looks good

I really like InvestEngine. Lots of fairly simple ETFs – I mostly use Tracker funds that follow the big indexes but you can also for instance get trackers on valuable metal prices, my Ishares Physical Gold is the best performing fund so far.
I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to buy shares from individual companies.
Charges are virtually zero, there is really good info on there showing graphs of performance over time both for your overall fund and the individual parts of it.
Possibly one thing I can think of where Trading 212 wins is interest on cash, but I don’t really keep cash in there anyway.
Customer service has been excellent when I’ve asked the odd question here and there too.

What is the risk in using these smaller platforms?

Why would there be a risk? Money is protected by the usual regs, and they’re really just a platform for investing in the market so not really much of a risk of them going under, they’re not controlling large amounts of money themselves like for instance an actively managed fund like the famous ones that have failed over the years eg Neil Woodford.
You’re simply using it to manage investments, the money itself is being invested in the usual big companies (Ishares, Vanguard, HSBC, Invesco, L&G etc). Even if the company running the platform went bust, you’d still own the investments and worst case scenario would have to manage them on a different platform. The provider has no rights to use your invested money themselves.

Equally as far as I understand it, the FSCS compensation limit of £85,000 would apply to each of the companies that you are investing money in – so I guess if you were feeling paranoid with larger investments you’d spread them out so you didn’t have more than £85,000 with any single investment company, or more than £85,000 in cash with the platform provider.

Jumping in too so apologies! Can anyone recommend me a stocks and shares ISA as an invest and forgetish… Have been looking at Vanguard lifestrategy 60/40 performance is mediocre and not impressed being so UK exposed. Ta!

If you’re looking to Invest and forget then I’m not sure you can do much better than Vanguard. Despite being ‘higher risk’ their 100% equity funds have performed much better than the 80 or 60% ones.