Brokers

Hargreaves Lansdown and Fund Charges

Phil Oakley of Sharescope wrote a good piece on Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) in his weekly roundup published on 16th February. Why are they so profitable a business when, as Terry Smith said, they seem to be in essence a “distributor” operating in a highly competitive field with few barriers to entry? The answer, apart from their high-quality customer service, is the level of charges they make on investment in funds (unit trusts and OEICS, not investment trusts which are treated as ...

Barclays Stockbroking Complaints

Several newspapers and on-line news services have reported this week on the debacle at Barclays. They launched a new “Smart Investor” site to replace their Barclayshare share trading service. The complaints range from failure to advise new account log-in details, support service uncontactable, old features missing (or perhaps simply moved elsewhere and not easily found in some cases), higher charges (fees restructured), to some account types or share holdings being no longer permitted. Barclays have integrated it with their on-line bank account ...

Another Financial Services Scandal: Broker Fined

A second Broker that has been fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for years of committing ADR Securities Violations. This is yet another example of the unacceptable behaviour and bad culture that has pervaded far too many financial services organisations (and arguably still does). In this case Banca IMI Securities Corp issued ADRs even though it did not own the underlying shares. This made it possible for such ADRs to be used for inappropriate short selling or inappropriate profiting around dividend ...

TD Direct & the FCA – Update

There have been further developments since my original blog post, on the topic of changes to TD Direct's client monies policy, which cause me to re-examine the issue and its implications. Firstly, I am pleased that Interactive Investor, TD Direct's new owner, have responded to my post, as follows: Interactive Investor’s primary responsibility is the security of a client’s data, cash and assets. Current FCA rules state that client money must not be placed out on unbreakable deposits of more than 30 days. ...

Our Risk, Their Gain: TD Direct & the FCA

Thursday last, I was somewhat shocked to receive the following missive from one of my brokers, TD Direct (now owned by Interactive Investor): The key paragraph is this: To ensure we maintain our ability to appropriately diversify client money across highly rated, strongly capitalised banks, our regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has given us, and other similar firms, permission to deposit some of our client monies in fixed term deposits for up to 95 days. This is a change to the current ...