Has anyone ever done a £100k trade with any of the above mentioned? Presently paying Davy .5% on each £100k trade, both buying and selling. It's ridiculous that sometimes they are making more money on my trade in commission costs than I am able to make in profit.
Yes, have done some large trades with Saxo, up to £250k.
Pluses for Saxo: reasonably decent online trading platform (costs extra for some premium features which I don't need); can deposit in euros, auto-converted to Sterling for Sterling trades; they seem to have gotten rid of their inactivity fee (I got charged a few years ago, now I don't; don't know if you have to have above a certain account value); trading costs are "ok" -- generally 0.1% to 0.15%, minimum £12 so not great if you're trading less than a few k at a time. There's a schedule of prices somewhere online, look up Saxo Capital Markets UK Ltd. There is a monthly share custody fee, think it's about 0.01%, minimum £10.
Minuses for Saxo: they seem to have doubled their margin on EUR->GBP/GBP->EUR conversions. Used to be 0.5% in their favour compared to the mid market rate, I think they may have changed it to 1%. That makes it
darn expensive. I can live with it as only using Sterling for dividend-paying UK Investment Trusts and hold them for a long time. Got stung a couple of times for orders that got split for no good reason and ended up with single-digit 10p shares with £12 commission. An infrequent glitch though. Their customer service is crap -- can take days or weeks to resolve issues raised in their online system, and telephone support will leave you queuing for hours. Have very rarely had to use it though.
Despite the above gripes, I'm actually a moderately happy customer. Bit nervous the UK will get booted out of providing financial services to EU countries when Liz Truss scuppers the Brexit deal.
