Updated: 18th January 2022
Fidelity Review
A fund manager and a platform owner – you can access Fidelity’s own investments and many more besides. Lots of tools, guides or videos to get you up to speed.
The overall score is calculated as the sum of the individual section scores and then rebased to be out of 5.
Overall Score
Our View
What accounts are available?
All the main accounts are available at Freetrade: the Individual Savings Account (ISA), the Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP), and the General Investment Account (GIA). It’s worth noting though that the SIPP only allows you to build a pension pot. When you want to draw on your pension you’ll need to go elsewhere. Investing for your children (or grandchildren) is also limited at Freetrade as there’s no Junior ISA or SIPP at present.
We upweighted scores for providers who had the basic accounts available - ISA, SIPP and GIA.
Score
What kind of investments can I make?
A pretty creditable score here for the Fidelity platform. We like the fact that this fund manager’s platform isn’t just restricted to their own funds, but also offers a good range of competitor funds too and investment trusts and exchange traded funds. Like all platforms, Fidelity make money when you buy and sell investments, and when you hold them on their platform. There one or two gaps which may or may not be important to you – bonds and shares in companies listed outside London aren’t available.
We upweighted scores for providers who made funds, investment trusts, exchange traded funds and UK shares available. Bonds and international shares were less important.
Score
What services do they offer?
In terms of the services available to users of the Fidleity platform, they are on a par with all the bigger names like Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor. They have tools like a retirement planning calculator and plenty of videos to help newbie investors learn the basics. Not only that, there are lists of favourite funds and exchange traded funds (although none for investment trusts?!) and there’s also funds they run which allows access to these faves. What’s more, they also offer financial advice if you need it. Quite a comprehensive offering all in all.
The most important services were monthly investing, and dividend reinvestment, so we upweighted scores for platforms who provided these services.
Score
How much does it cost?
Costs for buying and selling investments are pretty much similar to the main independent platforms. We can argue if these fees are too much generally, but Fidelity are in the pack. Their platform, or custody, fees for holding investments on the platform are structured in a similar way too. There’s no cap if you hold funds meaning the bigger the value of your funds, the more £s you will pay. For listed investments like shares and investment trusts, the fees are capped, so you won’t suffer the same issue.