AutoInvest - Feedback

A professor of finance at the Wharton School told me how a regular exercise he has been setting students for many years is to invent and back-test strategies for timing entry to the market. They love it. They can try out all sorts of crazy ideas. Some try only buying red days, or buying on up ticks, buying at a certain time of day, when the marker has fallen x% from its peak, etc etc. Of course the findings are that no strategy consistently does any better than random entry to the market. He says there is perhaps a very mild benefit from a momentum strategy, but otherwise nothing significant.

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I hesitate to suggest features, as I know the team are very busy. But here goes. The ideas below overlap. It is really just one or the other of these first two bullet points that would be nice.

  • I would enjoy if the Holdings tab of a pie could include a single press toggle to show the daily chart of each component same as watchlists do. Then I could have a sense of how my pie is doing today. Are most components red or green today?

  • As substitute for the above I am presently making a special watchlist corresponding to each of my pies. It would be nice if this could be automated via a button press in pie options: create watchlist from pie, and also a button at the bottom of a watchlist create pie from watchlist. Added to this could be one button press switching back and forth between the viewing of these two once both have been created. (I appreciate there is a current problem that the maximum sizes of watchlists are currently smaller than the maximum size of pies, and not all investments are eligible to put in pies. But as a start we could have create watchlist from pie working if pie not too many investments).

  • Also would be lovely to have access to an aggregate chart somewhere, the same as shown for my entire portfolio, showing growth of a particular pie (but I appreciate this may be far too difficult to compute in real time).

  • Implement a function copy [watchlist, pie] to [Invest, ISA] account I like to follow and invest in the same investments and pies in my Invest and ISA accounts.

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Overall, Iā€™m loving what Iā€™ve seen so far. Annoyingly pies were activated the day after I basically did ā€œthe pie thingā€ manually with a bunch of stocks and value amounts. Iā€™m really looking forward to seeing it in action for my next deposit.

Some minor usability feedback though when I was setting up a pie (Android). I had added some instruments and was ready to go to the next step, however the keyboard was covering the next button at the bottom of the screen and all I could see without dismissing the keyboard was the close button in the top right. As this was a new UI to me, I obviously hadnā€™t clocked the next button at the bottom when I first started, so my instinct (and in my mind the only way to now get out of this screen) was to press the close button, which cancelled the new pie setup and dumped me back to the pie list.

Floating the next button above the keyboard loses you some real estate in the search results, so maybe a simple ā€œyouā€™ve added instruments, are you sure you want to cancel pie setupā€ warning would help. I had added 9 instruments to the pie, so while it didnā€™t take very long to make a new pie, add them again, and do it correctly, my initial UX was slightly spoiled.

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+1 :+1: for your suggestions and related to the aggregate chart I think it can be in the Pie something like a stacked graph area chart (which may be also implemented in Allocation area in Portfolio-Instruments)

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@BenP In this case what I defaulted to was the back arrow, which takes you out of the list but doesnā€™t affect the selection of holdings to place in your pie.

I just tested that, and pressing the back arrow and the Android back button do both dismiss the keyboard so you can then see the next button. However, you only get a back arrow if youā€™ve first gone into ā€œStocksā€ or ā€œETFsā€, so if you start off searching by ticker symbols straight away then there is no back button and the only thing visible without dismissing the keyboard is the cross button again.

Feature suggestion. Already I am in the circumstance that I wish to suspend further investment in one company, but do not yet wish to sell the shares I have already purchased. So I would like to be able to edit the target to 0%, not just as now to a minimum of 1% with slider, or 0.5% with keyboard entry. Then I can add money ā€œBy targetsā€. I appreciate that I could achieve the same thing by making a ā€œCustomā€ purchase, but that means setting custom sliders afresh each time I purchase.

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When autoinvesting in a pie within an ISA are there safeguards against us accidentally depositing over 20k in a tax year or do we need to keep track of it ourselves?

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When I setup autoinvest I found the plus in front of the projected value misleading. In this case I would expect the projected value to be 160% of target, not plus 160% which to me would mean Ā£100k +160% which would be Ā£260k

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Iā€™ve set auto invest on to daily and so itā€™s deposited today on the weekend when the markets are closed. Is it possible to only deposit money on weekdays only?

Edit: Whoops just seen the reply above mine! Same problem :smile:

A lot of replies in this thread so Iā€™m not sure if this is already mentioned - is there a way to set the auto invest schedule to only take money from my account on trading days when the market is open?

I set up my pie to invest in the same ETF daily, and deposit Ā£50 from my account. But these deposits also happen on the weekend, and are then just left in my ISA as cash because the markets are closed.

Could we, either:

  • Set deposits only on trading days (a stretch goal: trading days for the markets the pie is invested in?)
  • Set certain days to invest (M, T, W, T, F, S, S)

Thanks!

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The Deposit Funds page will not let you enter for deposit more than your remaining unused allowance of Ā£20k. Try it and see, as I just did.

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Having cancelled an investment in my ā€œfriskyā€ pie, I am left with Ā£304.24 in cash in the pie, which I would now like to invest, but when I try to do so I am only allowed to invest Ā£2.67. Iā€™ m confusedā€¦

Does anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong?

So Ā£20K is the limit, but what if I have more than Ā£20K to invest? Would I have to put the rest in the standard investing account?

Yesā€¦ You have no other choiceā€¦

Yes. Legally you can only invest 20000 a year in a ISA

This is of course a favourable position to be in. Moreover, the first Ā£2000 of dividends and Ā£12,300 of capital gains are tax free to a UK investor in a taxable account.

Although you have effectively cancelled the investment and its showing as cash, the markets are closed so the actual investment wonā€™t be sold until they open.
As far as Iā€™m aware this will happen automatically when markets open on Monday, if not, you may need to press on ā€œBalance Pieā€ and it should make up the market order for your investment to be sold.

Hope this helps.

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Would you consider adding average dividend yield for a selected pie?

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Thanks @drunkebab ā€¦ that makes.some sense, but I placed the order yesterday out of hours and cancelled today out of hoursā€¦

What did work was ā€œwithdrawingā€ the Ā£303.24 cash and then re-investing itā€¦

Still a little confused about the flowā€¦