Last week I polled the Small Cap Value report readers about trading platforms they use. The summary findings are here:
https://www.stockopedia.com/co...
Some readers requested that I ask investors about their relative satisfaction with their provider. So I've set up a further poll here to investigate this question: https://voxpops.typeform.com/t...
I will analyse and publish the findings here as soon as I have 100+ responses.
Francis
Hi Francis
I could not complete the survey because of question 6. I don't really do any research on the broker's site, so I've no idea how good or not it is. It does not allow you to skip the question.
Also I don't have a main broker, but use three about equally.
Regards
Hi Lion Tamer,
All i can suggest is that you choose the supplier you like most out of the three and score the "information" question (which relates to stock prices, market information etc) a star rating based on how good they are, 1 being lowest and five being highest.
The main annoyance is brokers luring us in with a good price, then hooking it away.
Examples:
1 Increasing forex charge from 0.5% to 1.5% (Haliax & TD Direct)
2 Adding annual fees, where there were none before (AJ Bell & TD Direct)
Second annoyance is needless messing around with the site layout. Particularly re-ordering statement layouts so they no longer follow the established logical layout for Bank & stocbroking statements. AJ Bell were very guilty on this, changing to an idiotic layout & fobbing me off, until I e-mailed their directors who then had the issue PARTIALLY fixed.
Halifax had an almost perfect record for no needless fiddling with their site for ~17 years, but then mucked up the statement layout within the last year. This is nothing other than mindless stupidity on their part. Do they not realise customers download their transactions to an Excel spreadsheet ? Are there any share owning capitalists amongst them ?
AJ Bell have a minor demerit as funds from a sale are not immediately showing up & therefore are not (I believe) available for reinvestment (for a few minutes).
Anyway if your broker makes stupid changes, don't hesitate to ask them to fix it. If the staff do not act, e-mail the directors.
Overall, other than these points, I am happy with all 3 brokers.
I use YouInvest and IG - the latter I use for very illquid stocks as it's slightly better than YouInvest for trading those.
I really like YouInvest. It has a very user friendly interface and the app works very well on my android phone. It also has some nice features like videoclips of occasional macro analyses by the company and free access to Shares Magazine. IG on the other hand has a terrible interface.
