Hassles moving investments from GIA into ISA, and some suggestions to improve this

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Since the new tax year is here, I’m looking to move my investments from my GIA into my ISA, but I have found this surprisingly difficult to do efficiently. For perspective I have over 60 different investments in my GIA. What can I say? there were so many great companies available at a discount last year!

I emailed Freetrade to ask if they could sell them all, and rebuy instantly inside the ISA on my behalf, which they’ve said isn’t possible. I think this is a shame, and wonder how many other users would like to see this as an option.

I’ve now looked at doing this manually, one stock at a time, but in addition to the painful amount of time this will take, I have the extra niggle that I want to own the same number of shares, but for the many foreign shares I hold, the app only lets me specify how much I want to spend and not the number of shares.

So my suggestions would be two-fold;

  1. Enable buying a specified number of shares for foreign shares, with the acknowledgment that they could cost you more than the estimated price, and the order will fail if the price exceeds your available balance
  2. Offer a process for transferring from GIA into ISA, that shows a list of the holdings in your GIA and you tick the ones you want to transfer, and choose whether you want to sell, transfer the money and rebuy as many as you can afford with the proceeds, or (so long as you have a reasonable amount of additional funds in your new ISA), sell in the GIA, transfer the proceeds and buy the same number of shares in the ISA.

It would also be much appreciated if we could hold the funds in the foreign currency during the sell and rebuy process, to eliminate the FX costs.

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The transfer feature you want is called ‘bed and ISA’. Some higher-cost brokers offer it, but Freetrade doesn’t (yet). There’s a discussion thread where you can vote for it, though, to try to encourage Freetrade to develop it. Click through below:

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Thank you for this. I searched to see if there was already thread for it but I didn’t know the proper term for it. I will definitely upvote the bed and ISA thread!

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I’m in the middle of doing this the painfully slow way at the moment. Having to keep checking if it’s moved from unsettled to withdrawable cash, then having to wait a few days for it to appear in my bank account is really dragging it out. I’m doing a couple of grand at a time so that I can do the buy and sell at the same time and get about the same price

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