The best investment platforms for UK beginners

Disclaimer: This article does not offer financial advice and shouldn’t be taken as such. 

When you first get started, muddling through which platforms to use for investing your money is like learning another language. So why struggle? 

It’s worth mentioning that investing your money does not guarantee success. You can lose money just as easily as gaining it. Only invest money you can stomach losing. 

The platforms we’ll go over are:

• IG
• HSBC
• Fidelity International
• eToro
• Evestor

Before we get started, here’s a vital piece of information. Open a ‘Stocks and Shares ISA’. 

Trading through a stocks and shares ISA can stop you from paying taxes on your positive returns. 

Platforms that let you trade through an ISA account are much more valuable, because you get to keep a lot more of your money. 

If you make money, a normal trading account can result in you paying additional tax. A stocks and shares ISA wouldn’t. 

Unfortunately, there is a limit. You can only put in £20,000 a year across all of your ISAs. That means if you store £200 a month in a ‘Help to Buy ISA’, you could only put £17,600 a year into a shares ISA. 

For more information, check out ‘Do I declare an ISA on my tax return?’

Now that’s out of the way, let’s have a look at the best apps you can use for investing. 

After an app that you can use to trade stocks and shares like a pro? IG Trading is a strong option. 

With IG, you do all of the work yourself. This includes finding companies to invest in, choosing how much to invest, and deciding when to sell. 

IG is also a provider that lets you open a share trading ISA account. Perfect for keeping your hard earned gains tax-free. 

One perk of IG is that it gives you the option to open a demo account. This demo account is perfect for learning how to invest, without risking any money. 

Of course, you won’t make any money either — but it’s an excellent learning tool. 

Unfortunately, IG is a little expensive. The minimum you can deposit in an account is £250, and you must purchase at least £90 worth of shares in each trade. 

If you’re a little wary about putting your money somewhere that isn’t a bank, you’re in luck. HSBC have investment options. 

They do like to make it quite easy for you with their ‘funds’ option, offering five investment portfolios. These range from cautious to adventurous, with costs starting at around 0.45%.

On the other hand, if you want more control over your money then you’ll want the ‘shares’ option. This lets you choose exactly which companies you want to invest in. 

If you want to keep your money tax-free too, HSBC has a stocks and shares ISA you can open. 

One hassle-free option for trading is Fidelity. They’re a relatively large trading platform, and make investing an incredibly simple process. 

Like HSBC, you get the option of investing in a range of different risk-based portfolios, or doing it yourself. 

For simplicity’s sake, you might want to start with one of the pre-made portfolios. You can always change your mind later.

Fidelity also promote their own stocks and shares ISA. This ISA has different service fees depending on the value of your investments. These are:

• £45 a year for investments under £7,500
• 0.35% a year for investments between £7,500 and £250,000
• 0.2% a year for investments above £250,000

In case you’re wondering, the fees look at the value of your entire account instead of individual trades. 

Another big investment platform is eToro. One of eToro’s biggest selling points is that they’re almost completely free to use. 

eToro will only charge you when you want to take money out of your account. Even this isn’t a lot though, as it comes to $5 (£3.80) per withdrawal. 

You should also be aware that eToro doesn’t offer an ISA. That means you might need to report (and pay taxes on) any profits you make from trading. 

While you can trade cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets on eToro, we advise against this. Cryptoassets are completely unregulated and lack UK investor protection. 

If you’re the type of investor who doesn’t want to spend time going over stocks and share prices, try Evestor. 

Where some platforms have high minimum investments, Evestor’s lowest limit is £1. So it doesn’t matter what your investment potential is, you can always use Evestor. 

They also have extremely low annual fees, at around 0.5% per year. For reference, that’s only 50p for every £100 you invest. 

Evestor is a robo-platform, meaning all you have to do is put your money in and watch it go. The only real input you have is choosing which portfolio to invest in. There are three options:

• Low risk
• Medium risk
• High risk

While we can’t recommend which portfolio to choose, we do advise you pick the one that feels right to you. 

Low risk is great for slowly building up your wealth, and there’s the least chance of you losing money. 

Medium risk acts as the middle ground. You’re likely to earn more than low risk but the chances of your investments decreasing are higher. 

High risk, high rewards. You could make a lot of money, you could lose a lot of money. 

When you invest, your money can go up or down, so don’t invest everything. In fact, it’s good to use some accounting software to monitor how much you can realistically invest every month.

Our accounting app of choice? Countingup. This is the two-in-one business current account and accounting software, so it provides incredible control over your finances. 

Better yet, all that control can happen directly from your phone.

Why not try it for yourself and download the Countingup app for free. 

Now you know about the best investment platforms for UK beginners, let’s move onto actually investing your money. 
First, read our guide ‘How to start investing’ and go from there.