Hi All,
Just wondering what impact Freetrade’s decision to scrap most of its fees from next month will have on the market. For me an alternative that offers free ISA and SIPP accounts that can accept transfers and offers individual stocks, mutual funds, gilts and Etfs is sure to shake things up (maybe even enough to get IE to finally sort transfers in). Just wondered what everyone else thinks and whether you would consider moving across?
interesting.
i agree with you regarding the isa, sipp, stocks/etf’s and gilts offering will be appealing as it would be a ‘one stop shop’ for investing and would seem to offer more than IE do.
the tiered fees wouldnt be a problem as who would complain to pay £120 P/A for a professional service? i wouldnt.
for me i would also want interest on uninvested cash and at present i use T212 and lightyear for stocks and etf’s and the recent fscs increase has helped me.
would i consider freetrade? yes.
I’m happy with just ETFs, but it’s frustrating I can’t transfer my pension into Invest Engine yet.
Does Freetrade allow inspecie transfers in and out?
I believe they do but only whole units can be transferred which I think this is quite common. For example if you own 10.45 units of an ETF, only the 10 whole units could be transferred with the remainder having to be sold and transferred as cash. Alternatively you could buy the 0.55 to make it up to 11 units before transfer.
I think that is what made me start to have doubts about the platform, that and the fact they don’t offer in-specie transfers out. Hopefully having another free SIPP provider to compete with will have the same effect as the Vanguard fee changes and IE will get their act together and open up transfers from all major providers.
I’m seriously considering transferring out to them. The additional investment options and the ability to do partial transfers directly from my workplace pension (instead of to vanguard first then on to investengine) make it the best option now it will be fee free.
The only sticking points are whether I can do an in-specie transfer out from investengine? If not, can I do partial transfers out? I’d probably then do it in stages, transferring out chunks of cash, so I didn’t have to have all my investments out of the market at the same time, spreading the market timing risk a bit.
I have cash ISA’s to transfer in April and a 2026 ISA to invest, I already hold a T212 account so was considering the ETF route with IE.. Freetrade now throws up another alternative as the boards are fairly active with with disquiet regarding IE and issues that seem to take ages to resolve.
The FSCS protection upto 120k now means I can invest more with T212 but also will use another platform as well.
i transfered a cash isa last month and it took 2 weeks, i have another cash isa being transfered as i type and they both went as uninvested cash ready to invest.
they didnt come to IE as they will become ‘locked in’ but i will consider freetrade.
I’ve already started moving everything over. I think what sold it for me is having more providers you can transfer from and partial transfers.
They are not just ETF now, they have started to offer limited funds like Life Strategy. Would guess they will add more in future.
I think at the moment, they do not support in-specie SIPP transfers out. The alternative would be to just start building up funds in Freetrade via the partial transfer from workplace route and leave the current funds in IE where they are. It does mean maintaining the separate accounts which is a bit more admin but I guess that could also spread your platform risk and save you having to transfer via Vanguard.