High quality funds
Exchange-traded funds are very popular tools used by a wide range of investors,
from institutional investors and hedge funds to pension schemes and private clients.
There are over 1800 ETFs listed for sale in the UK, from 24 different providers.
For each asset class in our portfolios, we select the fund we believe offers the best mix of performance, quality and value for money and upgrade them when a better one becomes available. This process has brought the average fund cost of our fully managed portfolios from 0.27% to just 0.21% annually over the past three years. Our fixed allocation portfolios also have an average fund cost of 0.21%.
Fractional shares
This means that every £1 is put to work as efficiently as £10,000 would be, with each dividend received reinvested across your whole portfolio. Other providers trade ETFs in lots of one share, which with some ETFs costing well above £100 per share makes building a diversified portfolio difficult, even with large portfolios. Our systems, on the other hand, can hold a small fraction of one share, effectively owning pennies in any ETF, which makes global diversification effective at any portfolio size.
Lower prices
In 2017, our in-house dealing team was able to buy investments at a price 0.06% lower or sell at 0.05% higher* on average than the prices quoted on the London Stock Exchange. We make this happen by also dealing directly with specialist ETF 'market makers' across Europe to get the best possible prices. We additionally match deals between clients selling and clients buying, to reduce trading further.
These steps add up over time: in fact, over the past two calendar years we have saved our customers over £1.9M.**
* Based on all trades conducted in 2017, this is the difference between the quoted price on the London Stock Exchange at the exact time of the trade and the price we obtained.
** Based on the cumulative effect of the differences across all trades conducted in 2016 and 2017.
