Self Trade www.selftrade.co.uk Review

Overall Rating

- User interface

- Annual management fee of £40.25
- IT system crashes in high volume trading conditions.
- Share trading fee at £12.50 per trade, not the cheapest.
- Poor corporate actions department.
- Unable to report portfolio correctly.
- Poor communication and slow customer service.

I have been a loyal customer of selftrade from comdirect to squaregain to the current selftrade period. In the last 18 months to May 2009, Selftrade service have deteriotated to the level that I am forced to looking for a new execution stockbrokers.

1. A annual £40.25 flat management fee on each of their 500,000 customers, thereby bring in around £20m revenues for greedy management.

2. Last minute introduction of this management fee which will cost me a couple of hundred of pounds to CREST transfer my shares to another stockbroker.

3. A peak periods, the Selftrade trading system crashed and this led to me being unable to access my share trading account. This is a financial risk where losses can be magnified if bad trades are not exited and also, potential profits are lossed because unable to buy at a low share price.

4. Corporate actions department failed to notify me of corporate takeover of a share which I own. As a result, the shares was not brought by the acquirer company and now, I hold unsold shares valued in the hundreds which I can not trade or sell.

5. Fraud vertify rules as aprt of the AML rules requiring me to validate my identity at a expense and time. My relatives account was frozen until documents was produced, as a result of this, their portfolio fell by another 15%.

6. Unable to trade some shares due to their brokers unable to find buyers or seller for the size of the trade. This is not focused solely on AIM shares, other FTSE 250 and 350 had failed to trade successfully on their share dealing platform.

7. They are not the cheapest at £12.50 per trade and customer loyality means nothing to them.

8. Selftrade IT system is old and from the bottom status bar on my browser, I see a 'comdirect' link which indicates lack of IT system investment spend.

9. There were time when my portfoilio was inaccurately reported, this was the result of IT system failures.

10. Customer service is poor and slow, they fail to reply to my electronic emails messages.

10. Due to the credit crunch they have not increased their asset protection scheme like other banks have done. I think Selftrade is risky for investors who have over £30k invested. Should the company folds, then not 100% of cash funds can be return back to their investor.

This company is a financial risk to any UK investor.