I have 100% of my stocks & shares ISA in this fund, directly with Vanguard. I would look to move my ISA to Freetrade if they had this fund. (Edit: Done a strikethrough of the below text, been pointed out that it’s incorrect)
I’m currently not approaching the annual capital gains allowance of £11,700 with my regular Freetrade account, so there is no incentive there to switch to the ISA.
As well as the fund in the title, Freetrade could offer all of the Lifestrategy funds, Income & Accumulation, from 0% equities up to 100% equities.
That’s the wrong charge to be comparing with. The 0.22% is the internal fund charge, which would be the same for any investment platform that offered the fund. You don’t pay that as an additional thing; it’s integrated in to the cost and performance of the fund.
The correct comparison is Vanguards platform fee of 0.15%. So in fact you’d need at least £24,000 for the Freetrade ISA to be more cost effective.
I thought i’d make a mistake somewhere in there. Did they say why they don’t offer funds? I’ll probably only ever have the majority of my ISA in funds.
Freetrade is a broker. It uses exchanges and market makers to offer certain securities. At the moment their universe offers to trade major UK & US equities and ETFs.
ETFs are similar to mutual funds, but traded like shares on a stock exchange.
Vanguard is an asset managers that has both mutual funds and ETFs, sometimes even both. Lifestrategy series are mutual funds, non exchange traded. To deal with those, the platform would need to make agreement with individual asset manager to offer their funds, and usually negotiate dealing fees & in/out fees. Dealing in mutual funds is out of scope for freetrade for now. They are more expensive to deal, and require manual / non standard processes.
Instead of lifestrategy funds, you should explore to see if there are 100% equity ETFs that might be usable here. E.g. something tracking ftse100, s&p500, emerging markets, eurostoxx600, Japan/Asia, etc. But you might need to decide yourself which ETFs to buy, and you might need to self reinvest dividends. Not quite buy and forget appeal of lifestrategy funds. The fees you pay to buy those ultimately pay for the service of reinvesting & rebalancing.
Note you can see the breakdown as to into which trackers lifestrategy funds invest into on the vanguardinvestor website. Furthermore if you buy exact or similar funds in the same proportions one can even save on fees. As the mix of trackers lifestrategy invests in is cheaper to hold standalone. But one needs 10k+ to replicate.
I’m a big fan of the Vanguard LifeStrategy funds and the Globall All Cap fund and hope Freetrade offer mutual funds in the future. I currently hold via vanguard invester but it would be nice to transfer to Freetrade.
Do you think Lifestrategy is the best long term diverse fund from Vanguard? I am weighted 100% equity to get max risk exposure, but now am I seeing whether there is something similar to the Lifestrategy fund but with higher risk + reward. Looking at 5 - 10 year investment timeline.
Lifestrategy has 100, 80, 60 (ie 60% equity 40% bonds), 40 and 20 flavours in both income paying and accumulating/reinvesting variants. It’s a bit better weighted globally than it used to be. Great product, as are the target date retirement funds, both - designed for the fire and forget investor.
I wonder @AchillesFirstStand if 100% is a bit high if your investment horizon is only 5y. Anyway, the closest thing to lifestrategy100 that’s available on FT might be VWRL.
I was probably inaccurate to say 5-10 year timeline. I don’t have any timeline, really, if I had to say a number maybe 20 years. Basically I’m looking for higher risk, higher return, but in an index fund so I can be fairly confident of consistent growth rate over a 10 year period. I don’t need this money at any point in the near future so I am trying to maximise it. Lifestrategy works well, but I feel I could be investing in a fund with higher volatility, but with greater average growth over 10 year periods.
Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing what will have greater growth in the future. Nasdaq 100 has had higher volatility and much greater returns, but will those returns be seen in the next 10 years, or will the US suffer a correction to sane earnings multipliers, for potentially negative growth?
That’s the thing about risk: it could go your way, or it could go against you.
If you want to take a risk, though, emerging markets and the UK are amongst those regions that have room for gains based on prices right now. Vanguard have suitable funds you can pick for that.
Do you know a small cap fund that you can recommend? This should cover the risk of individual companies going bust and maintain higher risk/return potential.
That would be accidental financial advice. And I am not an advisor. Sorry that’s my personal barrier. Research for small cap funds or ETFs reviews and offering at freetrade, iShares, vanguard investor, investing.com websites
I’m also not a financial adviser. I can tell you, however, that probably the most recommended fund on a well known and trustworthy investment forum is Vanguard’s global all-cap fund, which includes small caps. I personally much prefer it over LifeStrategy, but this is not a recommendation from me. You should consider your own circumstances and risk tolerance.
Has anyone paid attention to distributions of funds in LifeStrategy 100%? Looking at the portfolio data section of Vanguard’s webpage you can see the current distributions are from 31/12/2019 but I’m wondering how quickly they publish changes.
Knowing this you could just manually rebalance your portfolio and pay less than 0.22% (assuming).
And it would be interesting to see in general how the constituents and distributions are changing according to Vanguard’s analysis of where the markets are going.
I would really like to see this fund on Freetrade as well. Another fund that I would want to see is the Fidelity Index World where I have the most of my stocks & shares ISA.
Do we know whether Freetrade is planning to offer funds and when?
