Tag: discount brokers

Categories
Updates

Various UK broker updates

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.
Categories
News

TD Direct UK closing some non-resident accounts

As mentioned by users of this site and elsewhere, TD Direct Investing UK has informed non-residents in a number of countries that it will be closing their accounts. Japanese residents seem to be the most commonly affected, but some clients in the Middle East have apparently been told the same.

I had been expecting that the firm might start to steer non-residents towards TD Direct Investing International in Luxembourg (formerly known as Internaxx) instead of the UK arm, but it seems that some of the users who are having their accounts closed have been told that TDDII won’t accept them either.

Exactly what lies behind this isn’t clear – areas such as complying with money laundering regulations are an obvious possibility, but the underlying reason could be a wider drive to simply admin and cut costs. Regardless, the extremely short notice period means that many affected clients are understandably not very satisfied.

There’s a discussion on the UK stock broker accounts for non-residents post about alternative providers, although the choice among UK-domiciled brokers is likely to be slim.

Categories
News

Selftrade stops opening new accounts

In recent days, a few people have noted that UK broker Selftrade has stopped opening new client accounts. The text on the account page has been reading “We are undertaking a review to enhance some of our processes, so we are unable to progress your application at this time”, which could mean anything.

Today, an article on Money Marketing sheds a little bit more light:

Execution-only platform Selftrade has stopped taking on new customers with the platform voluntarily varying its permissions following discussions with the FSA.

Exactly what’s going on is still not clear, but the involvement of the regulator will not reassure some users. For obvious reasons then, Selftrade is at pains to stress that whatever it is has not involved any losses to clients or the firm:

Continue reading “Selftrade stops opening new accounts”
Categories
News

New UK fund platform comparison tool

Justin Modray of Candid Money has launched a rather useful new tool for UK fund investors: An interactive fund platform comparison that lets you check how much a given fund or basket of funds will cost you across multiple platforms and helps identify the best fund supermarket/discount broker combination for your needs.

So far there are six fund supermarket/broker combinations on there – Alliance Trust Savings, Bestinvest, Cavdenish Online, Clubfinance Frequent Trader, Interactive Investor and rPlan. Several others are on the way – ICICI and TD Direct Investing (which are both Cofunds brokers, like ICICI) and Sippdeal.

The notable omission is Hargreaves Lansdown, which has declined to take part. Given how uncompetitive its charges look these days, that’s no surprise.

It would perhaps be handy to have Saxo’s Modern Wealth Management service in there as well at some point, but other than that the tool covers all the providers currently included in the UK fund supermarket comparison table on this site.

Categories
Updates

Small UK broker updates

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.

Categories
Updates

Commfreefunds no longer taking on new clients

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.

Categories
News

RDR update: Alliance Trust Savings and ICICI Bank UK

The temporary but large reduction in funds available for investment on the Alliance Trust Savings platform – give quite high profile coverage in the Daily Telegraph – is another example of why picking a new fund supermarket requires caution while the effects of the Retail Distribution Review are still working their way through.

I am not inclined to castigate ATS too much over this – it is reacting to RDR and the platform review far more pre-emptively than most of its peers and it’s to be commended for moving to clean pricing as quickly as possible. Perhaps the change could have been better communicated, but ATS seems to have a fairly comprehensive RDR changes page to update users on progress.

The new terms on fund charges [PDF] generally look significantly better. Obviously, you need to allow for ATS’s charges on top of the clean fees, but seeing some firms already bringing their fees down on a transparent basis should hopefully drive competition across all platforms.

Continue reading “RDR update: Alliance Trust Savings and ICICI Bank UK”
Categories
Updates

Fee changes at OCBC and DBS

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 “Fee changes at OCBC and DBS”
Categories
Updates

Fidelity markets update

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 “Fidelity markets update”
Categories
Updates

Saxo Modern Wealth Management cuts fees

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.