[Mike Newman]

In reply to reply #24553

Hi Bob
Yes, I’ve also experienced appalling customer support people at HL recently. If it wasn’t so time consuming, stressful and expensive I would take my wife’s account out of HL. But because trading there is infrequent, I’ve left that headache for another day!
My wife’s account has been with HL for too many years to remember and when it was set up, I sent a letter, signed by my wife, to say that I would be managing and trading the account for her and for many years that has worked OK in that the occasional phone call has been handled correctly.
A couple of month’s ago, I phoned HL to check on a trade and was met with a demand to speak to my wife – no problem normally except she was out at the time – and although I explained that they had a letter from my wife the low intelligent person informed be that I had no right to trade her account and he switched off access to her account FOR BOTH ME AND MY WIFE!!! What’s more it took nearly 3 weeks of daily phone calls and messages before some sense of intelligence reversed the situation. That compounded with HL’s refusal to show all transactions in the transaction page of their web site and not to have an account balance against every input and output (Like most brokers and every personal bank account) will result in me moving her account to a better and cheaper one when I have a few weeks to spare -moving out of the Barclays chaos 3 or so years ago took 18 months!! So I’m not yet pumped up enough quite yet.

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[Mike Newman]

I’ve had a spreadbetting account with IG for many years which I use to trade options as profits are tax free, unlike options trading profits with a ‘proper’ broker are taxable unless in a SIPP (options can’t be traded in an ISA). I’ve recently opened a shares and an ISA account with IG which so far seems to work well with a useful range of web site features. Their trading web site uses all the screen width, so more info can be displayed – unlike say HL with lots of unused space down each side of the screen. The IG accounts can’t trade ‘funds’ which I don’t use anyway. I do agree that their customer service has deteriorated since before Covid.

[Mike Newman]

While I still have this thread open, can somebody explain why they bother to ‘invest’ with funds and not Investment Trusts? The later consistently perform better, there’s is never going to be a Woodford effect with IT’s. Funds have traditionally hidden their costs which even now are hardly transparent. Many web sites and graphing packages show the performance of IT’s but not funds. Funds can’t be sold quickly so if a market/fund is falling rapidly it generally takes a minimum of a day to sell and another to get your money whereas IT’s trade instantly allowing the ability to use that cash for a different trade at the same time. Funds to me are for fund managers to profit from whereas IT’s allow the customer more trading freedom at a lower cost.

[Mike Newman]

I moaned about HL on this thread earlier this year and HL are just getting worse! I agree entirely with Peter Reiss above. My wife’s ISA and SIPP are with HL (I will be moving both out v soon). I manage her accounts and I and have been getting more frustrated with HL’s lack of customer information and failure to provide a daily running balance (like all my own brokers do) so with both separate income and cash tabs, obtaining a cash balance on any day, current or past is either difficult or impossible. All HL need to provide is another tab listing the opening balance, cash out, cash in and closing balance, like their competitors do! We have just moved the cash free 25% out of my wife’s SIPP and HL made a pigs ear out of the process! When I did the same for my own SIPP, the tax free cash moved to my bank account, the same day. With HL it has taken nearly two weeks and several ‘phone calls and I’m further frustrated by not being able to speak to anybody who knows what is going on with the ‘simple’ business of taking the tax free cash out of the SIPP. HL are now like Barclays who destroyed their stockbroking division and now only allow customers to speak to unknowledgeable telephone answering staff and not to the department that you need to speak to. I’m moving my wife’s ISA to IG’s share account service and I’ll move her SIPP soon as well. I’ve had an IG spread betting account for many years and I’ve heard good reports about their share account facilities and service, so fingers crossed!

[Mike Newman]

I agree a lot with RT. Can I ask how long did it take to move from HL to II? I ask because it took 18 months to move from the ‘new’ appalling Barclays excuse for a broker to both AJ Bell and II and both problems were due to Barclays incompetent administration. My beef with HL is that unlike all the other brokers that I use, HL does not provide a daily rolling closing balance, so I don’t know from one month to the next how HL’s stated cash availability is derived – they just assume you have to trust them. In the past they have made mistakes which has taken quite a while to sort out. When I complain, as I do often, they will eventually email me a list showing the daily balance and this list is available on their twice (I think) a year statements. They have the info but refuse to be competitive and put in on the visible web site!!!

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