Various UK broker updates

 Updates
Apr 012013
 

There have been a number of changes to services offered by UK brokers over the last few weeks. I’m still in the process of updating all the pages to reflect these, but here’s a brief summary of the major ones:

  • Saxo Bank has closed its Modern Wealth Management service and is transferring existing clients to the Saxo Trader service. This seems to have positive and negative implications: The firm appears to be retreating from the UK fund supermarket business altogether, but is bringing an ISA wrapper to Saxo Trader, which may now be the most cheapest ISA for international markets where CREST settlement isn’t available.
  • Charles Stanley has closed its Fastrade service and relaunched it as Charles Stanley Direct. Changes are extensive – the key ones are that online trading fees have been reduced to £10 per trade, but there is now a custody fee of 0.25% per year (min £20, max £150) waived if you trade more than six times every six months. Given that one of the Fastrade service’s strongest selling points was that it offered at-cost personal CREST membership, the introduction of a custody fee will probably work out as a cost increase for less active traders using it for that purpose.
  • In addition, the number of brokers offering personal CREST membership shrunk further. NatWest Stockbrokers apparently no longer offers this to new clients, so has been removed from the personal CREST accounts comparison table. Fyshe Horton Finney – which offered a relatively expensive personal CREST option – went into administration and its clients were taken on by Redmayne Bentley.
  • iDealing now offers direct access to Euronext Amsterdam and Brussels.

Small UK broker updates

 Updates
Jan 212013
 

I’ve updated the TD Direct Investing profile and the UK international stock brokers and online brokers tables to reflect the new fees announced a while ago. They won’t take effect until the beginning of February, but obviously at this juncture nobody should be signing up on the basis of the current fees.

I’ve also overhauled the Barclays Stockbrokers profile to merge the entries for the International Trader and Foreign Dealing Account into one record – it seems slightly more logical that way, since an investor can run both services within the same account.

Commfreefunds no longer taking on new clients

 Updates
Jan 172013
 

I’ve recently noticed that UK discount funds broker Commfreefunds as stopped taking on new clients – this is apparently because the firm is planning to launch a new service, presumably in line with the changes brought about by RDR and the platform review.

The firm was one of the cheaper options for investors with smaller portfolios to access the Cofunds supermarket, rebating all broker commission in exchange for a 0.19% annual fee. With it now out of the market for now, Interactive Investor will generally remain the cheapest Cofunds option for larger portfolios, while Clubfinance is probably the lowest-priced option for smaller ones (although ICICI’s new service may be competitive for those in between).

I’ve updated the fund supermarket comparison table to reflect this.

Fee changes at OCBC and DBS

 Updates
Jan 062013
 

There are a couple of updates to fees at two Singapore brokers. OCBC Securities has slightly reduced its commissions on the higher tiers for Singapore stock trades – trades S$50-100k are now 0.22% from 0.275% and trades above S$100k are now 0.18% from 0.20%. This brings it in line with most of its local peers for online Singapore trades.

It’s a small change, but at least it’s in the client’s favour. DBS Vickers appears to have gone in the opposite direction. A reader has pointed out some significant alterations to the firm’s fee schedule for some international markets. (These apparently came in a little while ago, but neither I nor anyone I know uses DBS, so I wasn’t aware of it until now.)

Continue reading »

Fidelity markets update

 Updates
Dec 192012
 

Fidelity now appears to gone live with the eight additional markets they announced they would be adding earlier this year - there doesn’t seem to have been any official announcement of this, but the exchanges, currencies and commissions are now listed on the international trading pages of their website.

The new markets are Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Poland, South Africa and Spain and all relevant new currencies have also been added (Danish Krone, Polish Zloty and South African Rand). Rates look reasonable – for online trades, the euro markets are €19 (US$25) like others already on the platform, Denmark is DKK160 (US$28), Poland is PLN90 (US$29) and South Africa is ZAR225 (US$27). However, there is of course a foreign currency conversion charge on top, of up to 1%. Continue reading »

Saxo Modern Wealth Management cuts fees

 Updates
Dec 192012
 

Slight delay on updating this due to other commitments, but Saxo announced new fees for its UK Modern Wealth Management service, all of which seem to be in the client’s favour. The main changes are:

  • The waiver of commission on currency conversion for international trades has been made permanent. Any FX mark-up near 0% is rare, so this makes it extremely competitive, with the only downside being that the MWM platform only has a limited range of international markets (the new rates do not apply to Saxo Trader). In particular, it’s good for anyone who wants to hold overseas stocks in an ISA, since Saxo’s new rates make it one of the cheapest ISAs for foreign stocks around.
  • The annual fee of £35 has been removed for regular investment accounts and only applies to ISAs.
  • The fund supermarket has become more competitive – it’s now on an RDR compliant basis and will now return all trail and platform commission to investors. Saxo will charge an annual custody fee of 0.5% on fund holdings, although this is being waived until January 2014. It’s hard to know how competitive 0.5% will look in a year’s time, since most of the supermarkets have not yet announced their post-RDR pricing, but I’d guess it will be mid-tier – other firms such as Cavendish will probably be cheaper. Still, Saxo is for now a much more serious contender as a fund supermarket than it was, so I’ve added it to the fund supermarket table for the time being.

Overally, good to see a firm lowering costs and a contrast to TD Direct Investing’s changes the other day.

Updates on Saxo Modern Wealth Management

 Updates
Oct 062012
 

Since the Saxo Modern Wealth Management platform for UK long-term investors is rather different to the Saxo Bank platform, it now has its own entry in the broker directory. There are also a few updates to the details of the service from the summary when it first launched in April 2012.

  • Saxo has confirmed that the currency conversion fee is 0.5% over interbank rates, not 1.5%, and that this is being waived until mid 2013. Am not sure if this was an error in the original charges sheet or a decision to bring it down to match the standard Saxo Bank rates. Regardless, it is now far more competitive, making its ISA (which is only available through Modern Wealth Management rather than the Saxo Bank service) look like one of the more cost-effective ones for holding foreign stocks. Continue reading »

New UK discount broker and Prague trading from Saxo Bank

 Updates
Jul 282012
 

There have been a couple of updates to broker details on the site. In the UK discount stock brokers table, I have added a new service from Clubfinance, previously known as a fund supermarket and the cheapest way for self-directed investors to access the Skandia platform.

This is quite an unconventional service in terms of fees. It charges an account fee of 0.35% per year, with a minimum of £25 per quarter, but online trades in UK shares are priced at just £0.5/trade. Quite a few UK brokers are likely to adjust their fee structure in the run-up to RDR and the platform review, so we can expect to see some others experimenting with unusual arrangements like this.

In the international dealing area, Saxo Bank has added the Prague Stock Exchange for cash equity trading. It’s always encouraging to see a major broker adding another awkward-to-access market, but in practice the significance of this one is limited – there are just  15 stocks listed on the Prague exchange and many of them are cross-listed in Vienna.

The Czech Republic also has an over-the-counter market, RM-SYSTEM Czech Stock Exchange, but that isn’t part of Saxo’s new service. Foreign investors interested in that could look to Fio Banka, which owns RM-SYSTEM and offers an online trading service.

Updates to UK stock brokers

 Updates
Jul 112012
 

There haven’t been many recent updates to the site due to a combination of other commitments and few major changes that I’m aware of among international stock brokers. However, we have seen a couple of UK stock brokers change their fees and this is likely to become more common in the run-up to the Retail Distribution Review and the ongoing Platform Review.

In particular, we are likely to see more providers introduce explicit account maintenance charges for both fund and share accounts, since they will no longer receive trail commission rebates from funds. The advantages and disadvantages of this change can be argued – certainly the improved transparency on exactly what clients are paying seems good – but it will probably mean a net increase in costs for smaller and less active accounts, which have traditionally been subsidised by the fees received on larger and more active ones. Continue reading »

Binck Bank, DUTrade and other updates

 Updates
Mar 202012
 

There have been a number of updates to the stock broker directory recently. These include entries for:

  • DUTrade, an online broker based in Bahrain and covering much of the Middle East and North Africa
  • Dutch discount brokerage Binck Bank – reported to be a good choice for derivatives and structured products on European markets
  • IW Bank, the online brokerage arm of Italy’s UBI Banca
  • Hong Kong broker Core Pacific – Yamaichi

Other major additions to the site include a comparison table of US discount online brokerages for trading domestic shares and options – a long-standing request from readers – and a comparison table of Hong Kong online brokers. There’s also a comparison table for fund supermarkets in centres such as Luxembourg and Singapore that will accept foreign clients.

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