As far as tax saving schemes are concerned, Stock & Shares ISAs are an amazing value for money for knowledgeable retail investors. £20,000 of investment tax free forever: it doesn’t get better than that. Of course, equity investments come with the risk of loss, but if you are confident in your investing abilities, that is not an issue. With this in mind, I started looking around to find a suitable platform. My key criteria were:
·
Low or no fees: transaction and platform fees
eat into profits, so it is reasonable to try to keep them as low as possible
·
Wide variety of stocks and ETFs available for
trading
·
No frills account with no advice required
The end result was me opening my account with Trading212. And why not? Zero
transaction fees, zero platform fees, a large selection of stocks and ETFs, no
dealing fees for either stocks or ETFs, fractional shares, no minimum investment
level, no annual/monthly fees and a reasonably responsive customer services
team. There is a low 0.15% FX fees on foreign currency instruments, but that is
a breeze when compared to the kind of horrendous fees other players charge. I
have heard a few people complain about the speed of execution, but that is generally
not such a big issue if one is looking for long term investment.
What I did find a bit amusing was that of the top 10
non-sponsored links that Google spits out when I search for “best stocks and
shares isa”, only one (Times)
mentions Trading212, and even then it mentions incorrectly that “you can only
invest in a limited number of stocks and shares across various global markets”.
At the date of this article, Trading212 offers more than 10,000 stocks and ETFs
across the global markets. It also provides access to several investment trusts
and IPOs. In comparison, for the best ISA as recommended by Times, Barclays, I
was not able to even clearly see that how many stocks were available. Plus,
with £6 per trade for stocks and £3 for funds, it could not possibly be more unappealing.
One can only wonder how independent these compilations really are…
So, as an outraged happy customer I thought it was only fair
to post an article to try to correct the balance somewhat. Assuming you want to
deal with shares and ETFs, and are looking for long term investment, I would
highly recommend Trading212.
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