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UK stockbroker updates Q3 2013

I’ve made a number of updates to the UK online stockbroker comparison table and individual entries for UK international stockbrokers in the directory to reflect fee and service changes over the past few months. Most of these are relatively trivial changes, but there have been a handful of more significant events.

  1. Charles Stanley has stopped offering personal CREST accounts through its online Charles Stanley Direct arm (the former Fastrade service) and has hugely increased the fees for the service through the Charles Stanley telephone broking service (effectively to £420 per year once all fees are taken into account). A number of the firm’s other charges and commissions have also increased recently, suggesting that the traditional brokerage business is now concentrating solely on fairly large clients and steering all smaller accounts to Charles Stanley Direct (which represents its attempt to take on the part of the market currently dominated by Hargreaves Lansdown). Investors looking for a more low-cost CREST sponsorship now seem to be limited to Redmayne Bentley or Stocktrade. The personal CREST account comparison table has been updated accordingly. UPDATE: The Fidelity Share Network service, which is based on Charles Stanley’s online platform, will apparently continue to offer CREST sponsorship on the same terms as before, even though Charles Stanley’s own-brand service won’t.
  2. Meanwhile, Stocktrade has made some fairly significant changes to its service. These include:
    • Many international markets are now available online. Previously overseas stocks could only be dealt by phone.
    • Online and phone dealing rates have been made the same
    • Investors can now hold foreign currency in their accounts, rather than settling only in GBP as before
    • FX conversion fees have been switched to a tiered basis. Under the old charges, Stocktrade followed a rather unusual approach of converting at market rates, but charging a fixed fee for doing so. The new system looks as if it should be more favourable to smaller accounts.
  3. Saxo Bank is introducing an inactivity charge for UK clients – £25/quarter, waived if you trade once in the quarter. The new fee applies to dealing accounts only, not to ISA and SIPP accounts (although these are already subject to annual administration fees). This is obviously a change for the worse for less frequent investors, but is not surprising – there is a clear trend towards charging more admin, inactivity and custody fees among brokers, reflecting the loss of revenue from lower levels of trading activity in recent years.

2 replies on “UK stockbroker updates Q3 2013”

I have been a client( for 40 years) with Charles Stanley, and have closed my account because of the steep charges they have introduced. I need a broker to deal( happy on line) for my wife and I. Not many trades in a year, say12 plus bed and spouse. can you recommend a company? Many thanks. Howard Smith

Hi Howard,

If you’re used to the traditional Charles Stanley service, I’d probably say that Sippdeal, Stocktrade or Redmayne Bentley spring to mind as offering something reasonably similar at lower costs (now). The first two let you deal online or by phone, while Redmayne Bentley is phone only (Sippdeal, despite its name, offers regular accounts and ISAs as well as SIPPs.)

I’m assuming you don’t want a broker that will give advice – Sippdeal and Stocktrade are execution only, though Redmayne Bentley will do advisory dealing.

The choice depends a great deal on exactly what you’re looking for, so I wouldn’t specifically recommend any of them – but I think they’re probably a good place to start comparing.

Cris

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