Does anyone here know of a discussion board where people discuss and review their stockbrokers ? With sufficient critical mass, in terms of enough contributors so we get a good overview.
I use 3 brokers and shall review them here, in order of my preference.
1 Halifax (~15 years)
+ Good logical layout, which they rarely change. Logical layout for statements.
+ No major fee increases. Unfortunate increase to forex spread, offset by ISA fee decrease.
+ Can sell one stock and the platform IMMEDIATELY updates the available balance allows me to reinvest the proceeds in another stock.
Easily the best of my brokers.
UPDATE: 24-02-2017 Halifax and their iWEB subsidiary deserve a "Broker Stupidity Award", for after 18 years of good sense, they finally screwed up the portfolio statement format so that it cannot easily be downloaded to an Excel file. What were they thinking of ? Statement formats should have one stock per line in all statements. They separated it onto 2 lines, so it is completely illogical and cannot easily be moved to a spreadsheet.
2 TD Direct
+ Good range of intenational stocks
+ Reasonably logical layout
- Forex loading has been increased, which discourages me from making overseas trades.
- Some unnecessary fiddling around with the board layout
3 A J Bell (Youinvest)
This one was good, but is deteriorating.
- Unnecessary changes to layout, of both the website & statements. [For example, as we all know, every bank and stockbroker cash statement should have the date first, followed by the item, cash in, cash out and a balance. AJ Bell re-ordered these at random, so we cannot cut & paste onto the bottom of our spreadsheets.]
- Sometimes cannot logon
- Increased annual SIPP fees from £0 to £100 (after luring me in with a good deal).
- There is a delay of a few minutes between selling stock and being able to purchase something else with the money. Halifax manage it instantly, which is very good when I want to get back to my day job.
I haven't noticed much difference in the ability of the brokers to make trades or competitive pricing.
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