Good evening, I am currently using Hargreaves Lansdown as my Stock ISA broker but am contemplating a possible move to IG as the £11.95 commissioning fee seems quite large to me. I was wondering if together we could identify the best uk broker to use for stock trading/investing. All thoughts or honest recommendations will be warmly received. Merry Christmas.
"A wise person learns from their mistakes; an even wiser one learns from the mistakes of others!" Stocko Societas: https://discord.gg/QRhsHzFtbJ
Can anybody recommend a broker for a limited company? I have applied to Interactive Investor 3 weeks ago but my application has yet to be processed. I keep getting told they have a lot of applications to process.
You can easily do a small trade, sell 1 share for example, to get up to 3 trades per month on IG. I switched some of my account to IG from HL. I don’t regret it apart from the delisting issue. I heard HL was down the other day.
Also with HL you have to pay a 1% forex fee on foreign shares, IG is 0.5%.
Hi Rustbucket
Yes. They made it super easy to fill in the forms for holding shares such as Somero Enterprises Inc (LON:SOM) and deducted the correct tax on all my accounts
Customer service is easily available (in person) when I have a query (such as tax returns)
I don’t want to tempt fate but I’ve seen all the complaints on Stockopedia about brokers and AJBELL haven’t made any of the mistakes that have been raised
Just looking into AJ Bell and it looks like it's £9.95 per trade on ISA. To get £4.95 per trade you need to do 10 or more trades in the previous month. So unless you are a frequent trader IG are considerably cheaper, especially on US stocks. On shares custody fee £3.50 pm. On funds custody fee is 0.25% up to £250,000. SIPP charges are same apart from custody fee which £10 pm.
Forex fee is 1%.
i saw an eToro ad where they claim trading is free, it can't be, somebody has to pay somewhere, unless they're running a charity,
and you lot are the most undeserving of charity :-)
There may well be no broker fees with Freetrade but what are their spreads like? They have to make money somehow.
A leftfield suggestion is DeGiro ... a broker backed by a vast amount of German money. DG is way, way, hugely cheaper than any of the competition and I have found them extremely efficient and responsive. So far (four years), every transaction has been smooth and quick. And DeGiro has responded quickly and positively to all my requests for product additions, etc. I really can't fault them.
The downside ... and it is a big one .... is that DeGiro does not (cannot) offer SIPPs or ISAs. I'm not UK tax-resident and I can't take advantage of those arrangements, come what may. So, for me, it's a superb solution and something of a 'no brainer'.
I highly recommend x-o. I’ve used them for over 10 years now. Very rarely any downtime compared to the likes of IG, HL and in particular AJB who I always hear complaints about. A no frills service though, so if you need anything beyond executing orders it may not be for you.
One other thing, the platform belongs to the publicly listed Jarvis, so you’ll always be able to see the financial standing of your broker.
To put this into perspective, I don't think I have ever spent more than £3.00 to execute a trade ... including a few very large transactions. DG is a really, really good value exectution-only broker.
If you know of any cheaper/better (or remotely equivalent) alternative, please let me know.
As an ISA broker....
HL points
1. platform seems to freeze when the market gets busy
2. high fees for holding funds, (versus individual stocks and ETFs) read the details on fees carefully, so not to get a shock
3. watch the fx fees for non-UK stocks
4. for small caps, places all orders through quote system, so you automatically pay the full spread, or at least what the market makers offer
5. regarded as having good customer service (when one of my stocks ran a rights issue HL handled it well)
6. HL have a reasonable range of assets, but sometimes surprises me with what they don't have, mainly on foreign ETFs
7. Perhaps not relevant as I'm sure people here on Stocko choose their own assets, but I didn't appreciate their promotion of Woodford funds, or any other funds for that matter.
IG points
1. gives limited access to level 2 and allows some small cap bids to be placed onto the exchange, this is helpful for low-liquidity stocks with wide bid-ask spreads, you can side-step the market makers and enter the auctions
2. seems to stay up more often then HL but from memory, IG did have at least one drop out earlier this year, when the market went crazy
3. regarded as more bare bones on service (by other users here on Stocko, I've not tested this point)
4. reasonable charts, if you need that
All I can say on fees for any platform, is read the details carefully, especially on fund holdings, fx, minimums, etc. goto the terms and conditions page and check the tables.
I agree with most of that. There were trading issues with IG around March because Robin Hood type trading, since then they restricted some trading which seems to have worked but there is the odd time when shares can’t be traded on a certain stock, suspended for around 10 minutes or so or telephone dealing only, which is annoying.
One point I would like to make is limited orders are different on HL and IG. HL will only place the whole order, say you order to buy 5,000 Boohoo (LON:BOO) @ 99p, this will only happen if they can fill the 5,000 in one order, on IG they will buy at 99p, you may get 1 share or anything in between 1 and 5,000, this can be a real problem on UK stocks, as you could have numerous transactions, on US stocks it’s fine because you only pay 0.5% fee. US stocks tend to have higher prices as well, several I have held are over $1k each. I think on IG there should be a minimum order limit.
On HL there can be considerable delay in placing limited orders, I have cancelled some and then placed the order myself. Stop losses can be a nightmare on HL, with delays and being unable to cancel, also not knowing what is happening.
IG does not deal in funds, so maybe not suitable for some investors. HL did get a lot of flak about promoting certain funds, I never took much notice, a lot of the funds did not seem very good. I think quite a few Stockopedia members do buy funds.
Yes, that's the situation with IG and partial fills. On low liquidity stocks, sometimes I've had nice fills through the day on good prices, other times ended up with just a few crumbs of volume.
Frretrade are regulated by the FCA and like other regulated brokers orders are executed by LSE or Retail Service Provider. Would not be in their best interest to manipulate spreads as a regulated broker.
Most effective way to have orders executed at your desired price is to use limit orders to be executed at price you set, alternatively do some dummy trades to see what the quoted price is and compare with another broker!
Even though as with other regulated brokers, Freetrade segregates client funds and assets so that they are not permitted to be used to pay off any creditors. I feel most investors will have multiple brokerage accounts as the FCA only guarantee clients funds to £85,000. Freetrade offer a plus account marketed at £9.99 a month. This would equate to £120 a year. The cost for brokers to execute a trade I’m lead to believe is roughly £1, which equates to 120 trades for plus account users. Add to that .45% forex fees for oversees transactions and their margins are obviously very tight, so they are going to require large volumes of clients to make money. Probably the reason for incentives initially. There are a number of benefits in having multiple accounts, probably the greatest is utilising multiple FCA guarantees to £85000
https://help.freetrade.io/en/
https://help.freetrade.io/en/c...
https://freetrade.io/legal/ord...
Above links are for help pages and order execution policy
Link below is for account opening with a free share thrown in for anyone interested.
