Alliance Trust

[Dod101]

With the ATS sale, Alliance itself is now almost back to a 'pure' IT. The Times this morning rates it a hold and others a buy. I have been a shareholder since about 1991 but eventually got fed up and did a Pickering and sold during the Elliott confrontation. After that was settled and the new chairman got himself installed I bought back in at the end of last year. In that time it has been doing well until the recent downturn which undid most of the gains but I like the new style, and the chairman is a well known and successful Scottish businessman.

Having got rid of ATS they can now concentrate on the Trust itself. The £40 million they are getting for ATS and the HQ building is not going to make much difference of course and they have I am sure poured far more than that into it over the years but it has proved a distraction for them so from the point of view of the Trust I am sure the sale makes sense.

The previous management under KGC cannot surely be very happy but her millions from the ill thought through LTIP (she is still in line for at least one further payment) will be providing some comfort. I never thought much of her chairman, Lesley Knox.

Dod

[StOmer]

The previous management under KGC cannot surely be very happy but her millions from the ill thought through LTIP (she is still in line for at least one further payment) will be providing some comfort. I never thought much of her chairman, Lesley Knox.
Dod

I always shied awy from ATS as it seemed a poorly led thing under KGC who seemed to be overpaid for poor results imho. The Elliott thing bugged me and the changes thereafter didn't appeal. Let's hope the future works out well for them.

[Dod101]

Strangely enough I felt the same but the long term results scarcely bear it out. It certainly was not an outstandingly good investment but it was not bad either. Just shows what the press and poor publicity can do. Of course the management was bloated and as you say poorly led but that anyway is history. I am happy enough as a current holder and will remain so.

Dod

[Parky]

What about the implication for ATS customers? I have no experience of Interactive Investor, but I note that they have a similar flat fee structure to ATS, somewhat cheaper if anything. I suppose they will switch ATS customers to their own platform at some stage so I hope there aren't too many problems. Does anyone have experience of both II and ATS?

[TedSwippet]

Does anyone have experience of both II and ATS?

I do. For, er.... historical reasons, I currently have SIPPs on both. As a passive (virtually comatose) tracker investor, I find both platforms to be absolutely fine. If you are a more active investor than I am though, I can't really say what differences you will see. The flat-fee model of ATS makes it a good fit for II acquisition. Had AJ Bell bought ATS, I would now be looking to move away.

II's relatively recent switch from its own front-end to the one inherited from TD in the buyout I found to be a bit of a jolt, but only because anything new tends to be that way. Just unfamiliarity though, rather than any significant issues. Now I'm used to it and can find my way around quickly, it's fine (although I should note that my needs here are as minimal as they come). Contract notes and statements all came across in the II/TD merge. One irritation though was that old II customers' past history of secure messages got ditched, so it's not like everything was retained. Perhaps worth grabbing and keeping a local copy of any historical data on your ATS account before any migration, just in case.

I will be interested to see how II goes about absorbing my ATS SIPP here (assuming they do, rather than run ATS as a wholly owned but separate subsidiary). Hopefully in any absorption they will just merge into one, rather than me ending up with, say, two separate SIPPs at II. I was considering consolidating these two SIPPs onto one or another platform anyway -- it didn't make a lot of sense to run both -- so I guess my decision has now been made for me. Maybe I'll also dodge a transfer-in fee out of all of this.

[tjh290633]

I hope that II change the multiple accounts that ATS use when you get a statement. They don't need more than a single account, which would be much less confusing.

TJH

[Dod101]

What about the implication for ATS customers? I have no experience of Interactive Investor, but I note that they have a similar flat fee structure to ATS, somewhat cheaper if anything. I suppose they will switch ATS customers to their own platform at some stage so I hope there aren't too many problems. Does anyone have experience of both II and ATS?

I have a substantial ISA and a SIPP with ATS and another ISA with II (ironically to spread the risks a bit) II has the better website; the ATS has hardly changed since the pen and paper days although I do virtually everything on line and they have free and automatic payouts of dividends if you want that, which I do. I was originally a customer of TD Investing and it is their platform that II currently uses. II have bought the Alliance office building in Dundee where ATS is housed so I suppose for the short term at least they will keep the ATS systems as well as the office there. I am currently looking for another provider because I would feel very uncomfortable with all my eggs in the basket of II.

TJH must be living in the dark ages. I have not looked at a statement from ATS for years so that need be no issue.

There is another thread on the takeover though. As for Alliance itself I just think that the streamlined Alliance and its new management structure is worth a look on a five year view.

Dod

[tjh290633]

I am not living in the dark ages. A statement seems to be the only way to see all the transactions which take place. There are transfers to and from the "Fees account", dividends only appear there, and transactions appear twice.

Yes, I get a contract note for every transaction and a PDF statement periodically, but you cannot look at a single account as far as I can tell.

Other managers like F&C manage to do it. Why does ATS have to be so obscure?

TJH

[mc2fool]

TJH must be living in the dark ages. I have not looked at a statement from ATS for years so that need be no issue.

That's an unwarranted put down. Short of going through the individual transaction history for each and every holding, the statements are the only, and by far the most convenient, way of checking the dividends you've received.

ATS's accounts system is undoubtedly complex. It effectively has an account for each holding, as well as the four "general" accounts (deposit, income, dealing, fees), and lets you redirect dividends in six different directions and on a per holding basis, and I do wonder how many people use that full flexibility....

[Dod101]

I dare say I have used all of these various options over the years since I have been a customer of ATS. I registered with them in July 1991. Since I have been online I have never bothered to nor had any need to look at a single statement. As for the flexilbility, I used to use it; now I have all dividends paid to my income account and the balance is automatically paid to me on the 12th of each month.

I have a chart in Excel showing all of my holdings and record against each of them dividends as they are received. I would pretty soon know if one was missing, but it has not happened even once with ATS and I think maybe once in all these years has a dividend not been received (or at least credited to my nominated account) on the date it was due. For all the moans about ATS and its systems, they work.

If TJH is aggrieved at my comment I am sure he will let me know.

Dod

[mc2fool]

I have all dividends paid to my income account and the balance is automatically paid to me on the 12th of each month.

I have a chart in Excel showing all of my holdings and record against each of them dividends as they are received.

Ditto. But how do you know what to record for each? As you say, ATS pays you all of the dividends accumulated in the last month in one go on the 12th, so while you can see your bank account has received £xxx that doesn't tell you which holdings contributed how much to that.

[tjh290633]

TJH must be living in the dark ages. I have not looked at a statement from ATS for years so that need be no issue.

That's an unwarranted put down. Short of going through the individual transaction history for each and every holding, the statements are the only, and by far the most convenient, way of checking the dividends you've received.

ATS's accounts system is undoubtedly complex. It effectively has an account for each holding, as well as the four "general" accounts (deposit, income, dealing, fees), and lets you redirect dividends in six different directions and on a per holding basis, and I do wonder how many people use that full flexibility....

Correct. To my mind it is needlessly complex. Like Dod I keep my own spreadsheet records and it is a struggle to reconcile the cash holdings with what I think they should be and what ATS says they are

I just wonder how Dod manages in this respect.

TJH

[Lootman]

I currently have SIPPs on both. As a passive (virtually comatose) tracker investor, I find both platforms to be absolutely fine. If you are a more active investor than I am though, I can't really say what differences you will see. The flat-fee model of ATS makes it a good fit for II acquisition. Had AJ Bell bought ATS, I would now be looking to move away.

I am with ii (am ex-TD so that migration was painless). My ISA used to be with ATS but their rather creaky administration irked me to the point where I moved by ISA to TD as well.

The biggest bugbear for me was that ATS handled corporate actions by post, which seems utterly ponderous to me. (ATS may have changed that since I left them; I would not know). With TD and now ii, every corporate action I have encountered can be handled online. And since I travel a lot am not not always in the UK when these actions happen, I felt vulnerable at ATS.

Like others I also didn't like ATS's funky system of different accounts, and the correspondingly irksome method of accumulating dividends. I found I had to keep moving cash around from one account to another, especially for reinvestment, so I ended up stopping reinvestment of dividends.

Maybe ATS has improved a lot, but I found it clunky whilst TD was quite slick. Getting ATS off the Alliance books and trousering 40 million is a smart move. Even so, Alliance is hardly an exciting investment and most of the support for it here seems to come from people who live in Dundee

[Dod101]

I have all dividends paid to my income account and the balance is automatically paid to me on the 12th of each month.

I have a chart in Excel showing all of my holdings and record against each of them dividends as they are received.

Ditto. But how do you know what to record for each? As you say, ATS pays you all of the dividends accumulated in the last month in one go on the 12th, so while you can see your bank account has received £xxx that doesn't tell you which holdings contributed how much to that.

Firstly I am make things easy by setting all dividends to go to the income account. ATS provides us in date order with a list of all dividends in their Income Account as they are paid as you must know. Not difficult to transcribe these say weekly into my chart which is headed with each holding and the annual dividends are recorded against it. I then transcribe that automatically to a date order list ready for interrogation by a pivot table and as you know I can get anything I want from that. My key though is the dividends set against a particular holding. None is a surprise as I know at least a month in advance when a dividend is due to be paid. I cannot imagine what anyone would do with the reports from ATS or why they need them.

In my SIPP I tend to accumulate dividends in the Deposit Account because I do not want these paid monthly. It is just as easy to record these as they are paid though. I leave it until February and by that time have an idea of what my tax position is going to be for the year and decide how much to take from my SIPP once a year in March.

I agree with Lootman the ATS system is clunky but it works. Like him I opened an account with TD Investing but for me I wanted it alongside the ATS ISA so as to spread the reliance between two providers not just the one. Hence what I see as my problem now that they are going to be combined with no option on my part.

Apologies to TJH if my comment was an 'unwarranted putdown'

Dod

[mc2fool]

ATS provides us in date order with a list of all dividends in their Income Account as they are paid as you must know.

Err, yes, in the statement for the income account, but you said you didn't look at statements.

I cannot imagine what anyone would do with the reports from ATS or why they need them.

That is one of the reports from ATS. But of course, it only provides a list of dividends directed to the Income Account, not any that go elsewhere, and so doesn't provide a list of all dividends. For those that go elsewhere you have to look at other reports.

Can you really not imagine that folks might want to easily check on all of their dividends, no matter where they are directed?

In my SIPP I tend to accumulate dividends in the Deposit Account

Well there you go, another place to look, the statement for the deposit account. And suppose, as you say you have done in the past, you used the full flexibility of their system and had, say, the dividends from some holdings paid to the income account, from some paid to the deposit account, from some paid to the dealing account, from some reinvested in the same holdings and from some invested in other holdings? Where would you look then?

Your choices are to look at each and every individual holding and account statement, or to look at the "everything" statement. There isn't a plain and simple "all dividends" statement.

[Dod101]

OK but I was talking about online statements not the printed version we can get from time to time. They are simple to follow so I cannot understand what the fuss is about. Sure they could be in one of several accounts but for me who lives off my dividends that is not the case and even if it were, it is not exactly a minefield to have a look. I assumed we had to be talking at cross purposes but what threw me was when TJH said in his original post 'when you get a statement' I assumed that was referring to the quarterly offering from ATS. After all, we do not 'get a statement', at least it is not a third party offering one, we can get a statement or statements as often as we like, one of the advantages of being online. It is certainly all that I need.

Dod

[mc2fool]

OK but I was talking about online statements not the printed version we can get from time to time. They are simple to follow so I cannot understand what the fuss is about. Sure they could be in one of several accounts but for me who lives off my dividends that is not the case and even if it were, it is not exactly a minefield to have a look. I assumed we had to be talking at cross purposes but what threw me was when TJH said in his original post 'when you get a statement' I assumed that was referring to the quarterly offering from ATS.

I too was talking about online statements and thought TJH was too as I'd be very surprised if he only ticked off his dividends once a quarter!

I agree it's not onerous for folks like you and I that have all dividends paid to a single account, but for those that don't it really would be easier and clearer if they had a plain and simple "all dividends" statement, and there does seem to be a general consensus (well, me, TJH & Lootman at least) about, as Lootman puts it, "ATS's funky system of different accounts, and the correspondingly irksome method of accumulating dividends".

BTW, I too have an ATS account and an II account (and an IWeb one too). I wasn't particularly happy that II took over TD but stayed put anyway. Not sure what I'm going to do now.....

[tjh290633]

OK but I was talking about online statements not the printed version we can get from time to time. They are simple to follow so I cannot understand what the fuss is about. Sure they could be in one of several accounts but for me who lives off my dividends that is not the case and even if it were, it is not exactly a minefield to have a look. I assumed we had to be talking at cross purposes but what threw me was when TJH said in his original post 'when you get a statement' I assumed that was referring to the quarterly offering from ATS. After all, we do not 'get a statement', at least it is not a third party offering one, we can get a statement or statements as often as we like, one of the advantages of being online. It is certainly all that I need.

Dod

No, I was talking about what comes up if you ask for a statement online. I have just got one. It gives me two cash balances, £5.08 and £5.76. Elsewhere it gives it as £10.84. Why is that money split between two accounts? There is also zero balance in the fees account. In the past I have had cash accumulating in yet another account. It is a mad, mad system.

TJH

[Hariseldon58]

When it comes to statements it can be much worse !

HSBC Invest Direct, on-line it’s ok but the paper statements are pretty much useless. They have obscure references to the investments , eg iShares and then some numbers not a name !

Transaction are defined with three letter codes with a huge list on the reverse, always a bit faint , clearly a legacy system from the 70’s or 80’s when computing was minimal. My self and my wife can receive 8 envelopes at a time for three accounts.

Apart from that it’s ok !

[Dod101]

Even so, Alliance is hardly an exciting investment and most of the support for it here seems to come from people who live in Dundee

Well I do not live in Dundee, thankfully, but I was born there and I guess Alliance is probably in my DNA. However I think it is a perfectly decent investment and the recent changes will quite probably in my view anyway, give a good return. It is not unlike the strategy of Lee Freeman-Shore, the best of the best and all that, although it has produced a very long list of investments in their portfolio. The managers are satisfied that this will work and so far it has but it is very early days and I have put only some long term 'sleeping' funds into Alliance. If I survive that long, I will revisit this in five years.

Dod