Fund Supermarket

Our on-line fund supermarket allows you to create a well diversified investment portfolio which gives access to funds across a broad range of Investment Houses and across geographical boundaries as well as different asset categories to reflect your risk profile. It has generally been the case that most ethical investors, looking for a PEP/ISA, Unit Trust or OEIC have invested directly with an Investment House.

Our fund supermarket works on the basis of reducing the initial charges levied by Investment Houses by rebating all initial commissions and by securing discounts with the Houses which are passed on to you. Initial charges can be as much as 5.5% of your investment. This would reduce a £7,200 investment in an ISA by as much as £396. Exactly the same fund can be purchased via our Fund Supermarket for no or a negligible initial charge. You may think that by purchasing funds directly from the Investment House that these discounts would be passed on to you. Unfortunately, this is not the case and the Investment House invariably keeps all of the initial charge itself. By investing via our Fund Supermarket, you can ensure that the reduced initial charge is passed on to you and that more of your investment starts to work for you. These discounts apply equally to lump sum investment and regular monthly savings. We pay our own costs purely on the basis of something called "renewal commissions". This is typically between 0.25% - 0.5% of the value of funds under management and is paid to us by the Investment House who deduct it from their Annual Management Charge, (AMC), which is typically between 1.0% and 1.5% per annum. This makes no difference to the AMC which the Investment House levies - but since much of their administrative burden is taken care of, they can pay renewal commission to us whilst keeping their costs down. The more your portfolio grows, the more we are paid since we receive a percentage of funds under management- hence if we can assist you in outperforming through the creation and on-going monitoring and supervision of a well diversified investment portfolio managed by some of the most talented fund managers in the industry, then we are likely to earn more. Hence it is in our interests to give you the necessary investment tools to achieve and sustain optimum performance.

Consolidating your portfolio with our Fund Supermarket will make it easier to monitor its progress and reallocate assets where necessary. You can very easily log on to our secure server and buy, sell, switch funds obtain valuations and view transaction histories online. We also offer you access to state-of-the-art portfolio analysis and research tools. Once re-registered it is easy to switch funds at little or no cost- this compares to having to pay new initial charges when transferring funds between Investment Houses who are not represented on our fund supermarket, where you could be faced with new charges of up to 5.5%. Under new ISA rules it is possible to transfer assets built up in cash deposits into those holding bonds and shares. You can also keep your pre-existing PEP wrappers and preserve them, whilst switching the underlying assets, if you wish. From an administration point of view, fund supermarkets will send you two consolidated valuations a year, rather than two from each fund manager. This makes your task easier since you can compare the relative performance of your funds against one another. You can easily ascertain whether your portfolio is over-exposed to one particular sector or whether profit taking from a sector which has outperformed may be timely. If underperformance is an issue, you can cut your losses.

Our fund supermarket is independent of any single fund manager, which means its independence remains uncompromised since you can access funds from different Investment Houses at preferrential rates. Since no one Investment House has a monopoly of being the best across all the asset categories and geogrphic sectors, it is essetial to have the investment freedom to have an unfettered choice of funds. Our fund supermarket offers you the choice of over 1000 funds from 64 Investmeent Houses.

Consolidate your existing investments

If, at present, you have one or more individual investments in an ISA, PEP or Unit Trust/OEIC that are both managed and administered by the product provider then you can move them to our Fund Supaermarket to create one central administrator. If you have investments with more than one provider, you may be inundated with statements and paperwork throughout the year from these different providers. It may therefore be simpler to have all your holdings administered by one organisation whilst continuing to invest in a range of different funds.

When you re-register eligible funds to our Fund Supermarket, we take over the administration of the investment, and your money stays invested in exactly the same funds. The advantage is that both you are then able to monitor and manage all your investments in one place. If you hold non-ethical funds, following the consolidation route is an ideal opportunity to move these onto an ethical footing, since once these funds are re-registered, you can easily switch them on line at little or no cost. We can assist you with the Consolidation process. In order to do this, you will need to provide us with information on all of your existing plans and the whole process can make on-going monitoring and supervision of your portfolio a paperless, straightforward task. Moving your existing investment portfolio to our 'wrap' will be carried out without any charge to you.