S&P 500 Lowest Fee

I am new to investing

I want to put my money into the S&P 500 but I cannot find the actual Index fund and only wrappers like VUSA or iShares.

Which is the fund with the lowest OCF?

Does anyone have any other recommendations? I was also planning on going all in on the MSFT :slight_smile:

Both VUSA and IUSA are good. Their fees are 0.07%. However, there is one way in which it may be better to own stocks.

VUSA currently yields 1.45%. The equivalent ETF that is available in the US is VOO, which has fee of 0.03% and yields 1.85%. The reason we only get 1.45%, rather than 1.85%, is two fold: firstly, the fee is greater; more importantly, Vanguard has to pay a 15% US withholding tax on the dividends. For a UK taxpayer that cannot be reclaimed or set against UK tax liability. So in a taxable account you may incur an additional 32.5% dividend tax, so you keep only 0.85 x 0.675 = 0.57375 of the dividend yield.

If, however, you own a shares of a US company, such as AT&T, with dividend yield of 5.5%, you also have to pay the withholding tax of 15%, but you can claim this against the UK tax liability, so only pay 32.5%, keeping 0.675.

This means that there are pros and cons to buying VUSA vs owning individual stocks. Because T212 lets you buy fractional shares, it would be possible to create your own index fund of the S&P 500, perhaps not buying fractional shares of all 500 companies, but maybe most of the 100 largest, with representatives in all market sectors.

Personally, I own 70 stocks of the S&P 500, although not in the index weights. Because I am overweight in some of the high dividend payers, my portfolio has a dividend yield of 2.47%, which is 1% better than I could get with VUSA.

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I would not advise going all in with MSFT. Try starting with 5 companies and building up to 10, 20 then 30. Pick some companies that are quite different. A consumer staples like PEP, a growth technology stock like MSFT, a consumer discretionary like AMZN, a healthcare like JNJ, a bank like JPM. Perhaps pick companies whose products you like. I bought Mastercard because I was noticing how much it plays a part in new Fintechs like Revolut and Monzo. It has done very well in 2019. You can view the top components of each sector by looking at the holdings of sector ETFs like XLC, XLY, XLP, … (read on the Xtrtackers web site). Or IUIT, etc on the iShares web site.

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Thanks Rob

Is there a Trading 212 Discord for the UK?
Are there fees assosciated with Deposits?
How do T212 make their money?
How can I refer my friend for the free shares?

I think creating your own Index fund for 100 companies would be too much hassle when I want to reinvest more money etc

How do you know which shares or dividend payers and which are accumulating? I do not want the hassle of claiming dividend payments and would rather have my growth reinvested.

Hi @trojan!

Some answers you already have them on Trading 212 website and community:

[Trading 212 FAQ] Funding & Withdrawing

[Trading 212 Community] How Trading212 makes money

[Trading 212 FAQ] Invite a Friend

Cheers!

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Hi @BullChew

You cannot invite friends as seen here:

On top it does not detail the fees associated with each deposit type. It is a completely useless page.

Regarding inviting a friend, this feature might be available on limited targeted countries, as I understand from here: Referrals and Greek market. I don’t know if your situation is similar to this one.

As for deposits, these are fee-free for debit/credit card as you can see here at number 7.

@BullChew, the fact that you had to dig through some old forum posts to find something as basic as a deposit amount shows me that Documentation and customer information at T212 is absolutely abysmal

Why is the deposit fees not on the main FAQ?

I am from the UK, the referrals should be available here, regardless this information should be visible.

Trading 212 is meant to be a financial institution regulated by the FCA. Transparency should be key and its really disappointing to have to dig through forum posts to find basic, critical information.

Seems legit your opinion. Hopefully this information will reach the designated area in the website and in this case probably the admins can notice and act on this.

I was just trying to provide some information in order to help you. I do not have more power than that.

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Thank you for trying to help! We will update the FAQ page in the next week.

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Thanks

Can you please also add an official ‘How we make money page’ as my friends were turned away by the Free model because of genuine concerns on how data is processed to generate revenue.

Thank you for your efforts @BullChew

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https://www.trading212.com/en/Trading-Conditions

Deposit fees are given here. They are 0.

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Thanks, but the discrepency between that page and the FAQ page is alarming

@trojan You’ve just joined our community and with your first posts, you trying to create panic around our FAQ page by using words such as “alarming” and by making some other negative suggestions, even challenging our compliance.

We are open to feedback and criticism. But we will not tolerate toxic content in this community. Not even a hint of it.

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Yep - feels like Trojan is throwing the toys out of the pram before doing any actual research. All of the questions asked have either been answered in this forum or clearly on the website. In my experience this kind of negative talk gets people no where.

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I have been impressed by the very quick help one can obtain via chat.

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