DIY Pots are harder than they need to be

Product Feedback
1

I’ve been using InvestEngine for about a year now. Originally loved the app and ease of buying some ETFs - I had a growth account.

I got a bit fed up with IE constantly selling shares to rebalance to new weights that were set - and in the wake of the US election results I decided to create my own DIY portfolio.

Firstly - there was seemingly no way to transfer my managed portfolio positions to a DIY one inspecie - I waited around for nearly a week for the sale and settlement… Very frustrating especially when you’re in the same ecosystem

Secondly, at least on Android - I find the app to very quickly become quite slow and buggy. When you’re sorting through funds, this can just get irritating

Finally, perhaps the most annoying thing with DIY accounts is the lack of thought put into actually investing. As far as I can tell, your options are;

  1. Let InvestEngine auto invest in all funds per your selected weights (even if one fund is overweight, IE just invests at your target weights)

  2. Invest in each ETF in your portfolio individually
    So this is fine, however, you can only invest in one ETF at a time… Which means the estimated resulting weights are all wrong if you invest in multiple ETFs

I had to create a spreadsheet outside of ImvestEngine, list all my holdings, and then calculate the current weight and investment required to get to my desired weights.

InvestEngine is only capable of rebalancing by selling some shares, and buying others. When investing, I want InvestEngine to automatically determine, based on the target and actual weights, where the uninvested cash should be going rather than just investing per the target weights.

I appreciate it’s a growing business, and also appreciate the time it takes to develop functionality - however, this is friction that just puts me off using IE seriously. Compared to other platforms, IE is incredibly basic - and the sacrifices you make in IE (inspecie out, lack of transparency around trades being a huge one) brings me to the conclusion it’s just not worth the hassle.

I hope it gets better, but at this stage, I am glad I didn’t transfer my portfolios from other platforms into IE.

2

Hi @croftson thanks for the feedback, and sorry to hear you’re not happy about how our DIY portfolios operate. I’ve passed your comments on to the team to have a look.

3

I’ve spoken to the team, and they’ve pointed out that we do actually invest in underweight ETFs first.

As a result they’ve suggested that where you say “I want InvestEngine to automatically determine, based on the target and actual weights, where the uninvested cash should be going rather than just investing per the target weights” that this is exactly how it works.

4

Hi Fiona,

Thanks for your response

That certainly is not my experience, it auto invested per target weights rather than what was required.

E.g my S&P500 target was say 45%, actual weights was 48%
It invested at 45% sending the actual weight even higher, not accounting for the fact my other ETFs were below target weight