Contents
In a nutshell
Free investing! Or as close to it as possible. InvestEngine charge no fees at all if you want to manage your investments yourself, and a super low fee of 0.25% if you want their experts to handle things. That's as cheap as chips! It’s more than just low cost though, there’s a huge range of investment options and great service. 5 stars from us!
Our rating
InvestEngine
cracked open 🥥
On the surface, InvestEngine looks like a no-frills investment company – somewhere you can invest hassle-free. But it’s much more than that. It’s an all-round investment platform (that’s somewhere you can make investments) perfect for investors of all kinds.
You can choose to manage everything yourself, but there’s hands-off investment options too, where your investments are managed by their experts, you just sit back, relax and watch your money grow (over the long term).
Here’s the best bit, it’s the cheapest investment platform out there by far.
There are literally no fees if you want to manage your own investments! And if you want to use their expert managed options, the fee is only 0.25%. (other expert-managed platforms typically cost 0.75%).
You still get all the bells and whistles of a good investment platform, such as a great mobile app and website to manage everything, a Stocks & Shares ISA to benefit from tax-free investing, and great customer support.
There’s just one limitation – you can only invest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which are groups of stocks and shares (and sometimes other assets such as commercial property and bonds – which are essentially business loans that pay interest), all wrapped up together, into a fund, and the fund itself is managed by experts.
ETFs are a great way to invest, and incredibly popular, most expert-managed investment platforms only use ETFs anyway. You just can’t buy individual stocks and shares directly, such as Google or Netflix, they’d have to be part of an ETF.
If you want to buy individual company shares, check our our best investment platforms (UK).
There’s a huge range to choose from on InvestEngine, with over 500 ETFs, so you’ve got more than enough options!
By the way, there's currently 2 deals for our readers:
1) Get £25 for free when you invest £100.
2) Get £100 for free when you invest or transfer over £10,000 to an ISA.
For both, here's where to claim the deal¹. (T&Cs apply.)
Is InvestEngine good for beginners?
It is! We wouldn’t recommend starting out with a self-managed portfolio if you are a beginner (a portfolio is what your investments are called), which is where you’re making the investment decisions yourself.
But with InvestEngine you can benefit from the cheap costs of investing using a portfolio managed by experts.
There’s no fees to set up your account, no fees to open and use a Stocks & Shares ISA (which is where you can invest tax-free).
There’s no fees to InvestEngine when investments are bought and sold. In fact, the only cost you’ll pay to InvestEngine is a 0.25% management fee.
But there are other fees included with investing, whichever platform you use (more on these below).
If you compared this with Nutmeg or Moneyfarm (here's our Nutmeg review and Moneyfarm review), both popular investment platforms for beginners, you’d be paying between 0.45 - 0.75%. And if you use a traditional investment platform like Hargreaves Lansdown, it's nearer 2% for them to manage everything for you.
The minimum investment is also only £100, compared to £500 for the majority of investment providers when you open an account.
Plus, with InvestEngine, you can create a smaller separate self-managed portfolio when you feel a bit more confident, and start making your own investments too.
A special deal for you
Invest just £100 to get a welcome bonus of £25! (And more if you invest £10,000 into an ISA).
Claim deal¹Claim deal¹T&Cs apply.
How InvestEngine works
It’s simple. InvestEngine is designed to be as easy as possible for you to either manage your own investments, or get their experts to manage it for you.
You can either use their website, or phone app, choose one of the account options below, and you’re ready to go.
Your account options
- Personal account: this is the standard account, called a personal account, where you might have to pay tax on the profit your money makes (it’s called Capital Gains Tax, and you have an allowance of £12,300 (profit) before you have to start paying it).
- Stocks & Shares ISA: you can save up to £20,000 per year (this is called your ISA allowance, and all the money you make within the account is completely tax free, forever! You can transfer any of your current ISAs over, all for free too. And transfers won’t affect your ISA allowance.
Unfortunately at the moment, you can’t open a Junior ISA (saving money for your kids), a Lifetime ISA (saving money for your first home, with a 25% government bonus), or a personal pension.
If you’re looking for these types of accounts, check out our best investment apps (UK) and our best private pension providers.
Your portfolio options
DIY portfolio
These are quite special. Aside from having no fees, it’s a pretty great way of building and managing your own portfolio. Once you've decided which ETFs you want to invest in (there’s over 500), you can then select the weight that each of your chosen ETFs has in your portfolio.
For instance, let’s say you have 10 ETFs you’d like to invest in, you can set 10% per ETF, and with one-click, you’re done – InvestEngine will handle purchasing the ETFs automatically.
You can set whatever weight you like too, so you can have 1% in one ETF, and 15% in another – you get the idea!
As your investments grow over time, they’ll grow at different rates (and some may not grow), which means the weight of each ETF within your portfolio will change over time too. So one great investment might start at 5% of your portfolio, but end up at 10% after say a year.
That could be an issue for some investors who want the weight of each investment within their portfolio to remain consistent (to manage risk)...
This bit’s really great – you can hit one button to ‘rebalance’ your portfolio back to your original preferred weighting. InvestEngine will buy or sell parts of your portfolio to get back to the perfect balance that you want. Pretty cool.
You can just buy and sell investments manually too.
There’s also an ‘autoinvest’ feature, which automatically invests your money into the investments you’ve chosen. So you can be completely hands-off if you want to.
Expert-managed portfolios
If you don’t want to manage your own investments, or want an expert to manage some, or most of your money, you can choose a managed portfolio.
This is where you simply do nothing! All you do is add your money, and the experts at InvestEngine handle everything, you just watch your money grow over time.
You have 2 portfolio options to choose from, a growth portfolio or an income portfolio.
Growth portfolio
This is where your money is invested with a view to simply increase your money over time, which is called capital growth. Investments are made across the world to best manage risk and increase returns on your money.
Income portfolio
This is where your money is invested to provide you with a regular income, rather than just for capital growth.
The strategy is to keep to super-safe investments that pay a regular dividend (which is a payment from a company to its investors).
There’s 3 categories in this portfolio, which aim to give an income return of 1.6%, 3% or 3.8%, depending on how much risk you’re willing to take.
The income is also paid straight into your bank account. A nice touch.
How much is InvestEngine?
You might have noticed we’ve mentioned the fees quite a bit! Or, the fact there are no fees!
The only fee you’ll pay to InvestEngine is 0.25% if you decide you’d like a managed portfolio. And that’s cheap! It’s the lowest fee you’ll find on any investment platform for expert-managed investing.
Typical fees for ‘digital wealth managers’ are around 0.75%, which reduce if you invest more money. A rough guideline of 0.35% for those with over £100,000 invested. The more popular investment platforms are Moneyfarm and Nutmeg.
And if you wanted to invest in a more traditional way, with a financial advisor handling everything for you, fees can be as much as 5%!
However, you will still have to pay fees that the ETFs themselves charge, which are around 0.2% depending on which ETF, and these fees are paid by everyone who owns the ETF, not just InvestEngine customers.
(ETFs are held by lots of investors across the world, and used by other investment platforms).
And there’s also a hidden cost of buying an ETF, called a spread fee, which again everyone who invests in an ETF would pay, and this fee is the difference between the price to buy an ETF and the price to sell an ETF, and it’s often 0.07%.
So all in all, if you wanted a managed portfolio, you’d be paying 0.52%, very cheap! Broken down like this:
Customer support
The customer support is great. You can email, or send them a message directly on the website or app.
And if you prefer, they’ll actually speak to you over the phone! A big bonus for a company in financial services, where they’ll typically make you go round the houses before you can speak to someone, or never at all.
The support hours are pretty great too, from 5:30am to 9pm on weekdays, and 8:30am to 5:30pm on the weekends!
Is InvestEngine safe?
Yep. InvestEngine is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who are the people who make sure your money is safe, by reviewing and approving companies who look after your money.
Your money is also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which means if anything should happen to InvestEngine, such as going out of business (very unlikely), you’d get up to £85,000 back.
But there’s even more protection from customers too. Your money is held in a separate protected trust account. Which is completely separate to InvestEngine’s business bank accounts. This means all the money would be returned to customers if InvestEngine were to shut down.
A quick recap and more info
Mobile app: you can manage everything from your phone, on both Apple and Android devices. These apps are rated 4.6 out of 5. Pretty great.
No exit fees: there’s no fees to close your account and use another provider, you can leave whenever you like if you choose too. InvestEngine are confident you won’t leave, so no need to charge fees unlike some investment platforms.
Minimum amount: the minimum amount you can invest is quite low – just £100 (compared to an average of around £500 with other platforms).
Withdrawals: you can make withdrawals for free at any time you like, and it’s free to do.
Business account: if you’re a business owner, you can invest your company’s spare cash too.
InvestEngine pros and cons
Here's a quick run through of the pros and cons:
Pros
- Fee free investing
- Great range of ETFs
- Easy to use
- Very low cost managed option (0.25%)
- Great customer support
- Low minimum investment (£100)
- Invest within a business account
Cons
- Only ETFs (no shares)
- No personal pension
- Not much else!
InvestEngine customer reviews
InvestEngine has the highest score on TrustPilot (the popular reviews website), that we’ve ever seen for a finance company! A massive 4.5 out of 5, from over 550 reviews.
It’s particularly impressive as companies in finance tend to have much lower scores in general as the customer service tends to be very poor.
However, with InvestEngine, lot’s of the reviews are complementing their great customer service, alongside the experience in general.
InvestEngine’s phone app is rated 4.6 stars in the App Store and Google Play store too!
Our thoughts
We like InvestEngine. A lot. When you’re investing, fees can really add up and take a chunk out of your wealth. But with InvestEngine, it’s so low cost you won’t even notice them!
It is quite literally the cheapest way to invest out there. With the self-managed portfolio option there are no management fees at all, and with a managed portfolio it’s 0.25%.
The range of investment options (ETFs) is huge, over 500 to choose from. The mobile app and website are great, and clear and transparent.
The customer service is fantastic, real people to speak to. It’s got everything going for it, the only downside is there’s not more ISA options, such as a Junior ISA and Lifetime ISA!
We love it, and a big 5 stars from us.
If you think InvestEngine is for you, get started on the InvestEngine website¹.
Is there a deal?
Yep! There's actually 2 deals for Nuts About Money readers:
1) Get £25 for free when you invest £100.
2) Get £100 for free when you invest or transfer over £10,000 to an ISA.
Pretty good right?
For both deals, all you need to do is use our link to claim the deal¹.
T&Cs apply.
A special deal for you
Invest just £100 to get a welcome bonus of £25! (And more if you invest £10,000 into an ISA).
Claim deal¹Claim deal¹T&Cs apply.
A special deal for you
Invest just £100 to get a welcome bonus of £25! (And more if you invest £10,000 into an ISA).
Claim deal¹Claim deal¹T&Cs apply.
