The brokers that I use for buying Shares

When I wanted to buy shares I started off by doing a quick google search and got names such as Hargreaves Lansdown and Charles Stanely. At the time these were the cheapest in terms of the platform fees and that was in 2014 but a lot has changed since then.

These are the share dealing charges for Hargrieves Lansdown:

Deals in the previous month Charge

0-9 deals £11.95

10-19 deals £8.95

20+ deals £5.95

Regular savings £1.50

No platform fee for accounts which hold shares

Platform fee for accounts £0 - £250,000 which hold funds is 0.45%

Platform fee for an ISA is 0.45% capped at £45

NB: Funds have their own seperate charge

An example if you have an ISA which has £10,000 and you deposit just £1000 this month to buy a fund like iShares FTSE 100UCITS ETF offered by Blackrock you will pay the following:

Share dealing - £11.90 + Platform fee: 49.5 (0.45% x 11,000) + £45 (ISA fee) = £106.4

Blackrock will also charge their fee which is 0.07% x 11,000 = £7.70

Total cost comes up to £114.10 which is a total expense of 1.03% of your fund.

Charles Stanely had the following charges:

Platform Charges

• Stocks & Shares: 0.35% per annum (min £2/max £20 per month) or free (if 1 trade executed in a chargeable month)

• Funds:0.35% per annum or less

• Share dealing charge: £11.50 per trade

• Fund trading fee: free

Trading 212

This broker has 3 platforms: INVEST, CFD, & ISA. I have opened an ISA as I want to take advantage of the tax-free investment allowance of £20,000 given every year by the government to encourage people to invest. Trading 212 has revolutionarised the way retail investors can buy shares. Trading 212 has no platform fees of any kind. Their share dealing is free and their platform comes without charges. You may wonder how they make their money. They do it through the spread (difference between the bid and ask price), which is not much by the looks of it. The other good thing about Trading 212 is that you can buy fractional shares. This has made it easy for me to simulate index funds with little starting capital and hence dodge their expence bullets.

Trading 212 has a promotion where if you refer someone you will each get up to £100 of free shares. Create a Trading 212 Invest account using this link www.trading212.com/invite/Gv1hbqRo and we both get a free share!

Etoro

There are no management fees opening an account on eToro is free! No management or ticketing fees are charged and stock investment has no commission at all! Withdrawals incur a low fee of $5 and there are no clearance fees. The only reason why I do not use Etoro is that I had a bad experience with them back in 2012/3 when I deposited $100 and copyied trades and my balance went down slowly and steadily to zero even as I was winning trades. The justification they gave was not very convincing and I just abandoned them and never looked back.