Stumbled across this by accident, but itās truly eye opening
Iāve just started using Simply Wallstreet for analysing my portfolio, as recommended by someone on here. If you havenāt tried it give it a go - really useful info, and they have a deal on at the moment so works out about Ā£5 a month.
When setting this up I had to input all my trades over the last twelve months. And this is where the eye opening moment was. In 12 months I have done 156 individual trades, and these have cost me nothing apart from stamp duty. Had I done these trades with my old broker Halifax it would have set me back Ā£1,870
Now I know due to Free Trading I do lots more small trades, things I never would have done with Halifax @ Ā£11.99 a trade. But even so, Ā£1,870 - wow.
Has anyone saved even more in fees in 2019? Would be good to see who holds the record
Thatās because Buffett has a different strategy. He holds enormous amounts of cash too. Iām still learning, but I am trying to buy low and sell high, but not all my portfolio at any one time so I always have entries and exits on positions over time. Its worked very nicely so far.
I must admit the āFreeā aspect has made me trade far more frequently on FT - I probably did 25 trades in 5 years on my old platform, due to the fees.
Moving forward I expect to reduce the number of different stocks in my portfolio (currently 26) and then trade less frequently but in bigger volumes. But itās really hard not to be tempted to click the āBuyā button on the odd punt every now and then
I made a video on this quite a while back, and couldnāt agree more - I did it hypothetically based on how frequent I invest and its good to see how much youāve saved. If you have X amount to invest upfront to leave then of course it wonāt apply, but where lots of new investors like myself are drip feeding money, actually, the incumbent brokers are counter intuitive and could cause you to lose more than you gain.
Only thing that I think is worth considering when making these comparisons is that youāve compared zero fee Freetrade transactions to instant fee based transactions. So itās not like for like.
That said Freetrade still comes out on top, but if your happy with end of day free trades then your not as worried about price or timing the market, so the same thought should maybe be applied elsewhere which would in theory make the other sites cheaper with regular monthly investing prices rather than high fee instant trades.
