Charles Stanley Direct Reviews 

A few things to watch:
- Monies paid into accounts on the platform take several days to arrive. That is time you are out of the market with no doubt CSD benefitting from the interest in the meanwhile.
- nasty transfer out charges (£40 for JISAs for example, £10 per holding in a SIPP)
- high share trading fees plus an additional monthly charge to hold shares.

There are much cheaper options out there which don't nickel and dime customers in this slightly underhand way.

The website and app are acceptable. Service is fine.

My reason for 3 stars is I've discovered their iOS app, and presumably the Android app, share data with Facebook without the users permission or even knowledge.

I unable to tell what data is being shared, it could be account details or it may be marketing info.

But either way no data should be shared with Facebook, there's no good reason for their app to do so.

I've contacted them to report this possible breach of GDPR privacy regulations.

Always a great service with Shelley at Charles Stanley. Always goes out of the way to answer all my questions and acts promptly on instruction. Very re-assuring, professional and trustworthy company to work with.

I have handled two JISA's using CSD. I have used their website to trade and once to exchange secure messages - no problems have been experienced. I have never phoned.

Annual charge of 0.35% is average and acceptable for small value portfolios.

I have had my share account with Charles Stanley Direct for many years now. Of all the share accounts they are by far the best in terms of their responsive (and human!) customer service, price point, website and automatically generated reports. In particular Charissa Garratley went above and beyond to resolve a very tricky issue for me. Outstanding.

Requested a sale of a fund on an investment account, and despite confirmation they failed to act up on the request. When this was brought to their attention, the complaints department used a very odd and aggressive tactic in requesting us to take our business elsewhere. I've since reported them about this to the FCA.

A nightmare site, quite often down, very difficult to login from mobile- multiple attempts normally needed. Why can't a company sort out problems highlighted frequently over the past few years?

I'm relatively new to this but have found the app and especially the customer service to be very good. Response to any raised query has been quick as has the online chat assisting too. College uses use this company too and are generally positive, I've only traded a few individual stocks and mainly have various ETF's.

if you trade more then a couple of times a months be aware that CSD are very expensive at £11.95 per trade, so to buy and then later sell a stock will cost £23.90!

Compare this to other sites which are £3.99 a trade. if you are trading 10-20 times a week the cost difference is huge! Because of this I put in my transfer request papers and found that the transfer takes 4 to 6 weeks. I entered my request about a month ago only to receive an email from CSD today stating that they have rejected my transfer request because I have sold / bought some stocks during that time.

At no point did I receive notification from CSD that I would not be able to trade for x period of time and I honestly cannot believe that they expect anyone to not buy or sell stocks for the 4 to 6 week transfer period. They have now said that I need to start over again, so another month plus and apparently I am unable to trade during this time. Useless service.

Having been a customer of CS for about 3 years I am very disappointed that the platform has got worse and worse. The research section for news isn't as good as before but far worse is the speed of the site. Sometimes it works perfectly but then for no apparent reason pages take minutes to load and trying to sell a falling stock can be a nightmare when I am trying to access the sell page and I just get a message "Waiting for Charles Stanley Direct" all the time the SP is falling. At the same time I try to sell via the Charles Stanley App which is on a different network and that to seems to have the very same issue. All of the other sites I have open at the same time work perfectly and I have cleared my cache/ cookies and use Chrome as recommended by CSD and I have also run an internet speed test to check my connection and that came back fine (72mb/s). Please beware of this problem because it has cost me several thousand £ over the past couple of years. I am now changing to Interactive Investor which is also massively cheaper.

Great Service. Signed up for this year's Stocks and Shares ISA whilst on holiday! Easy and efficient process. Traded minutes later. Call Centre excellent and really helpful. Compares well on costs for ordinary user like me! All good so far😁 Thanks to all at CSD from Rob.

A good platform and decent deal for active traders who trade at least once a month where they remove some of the ongoing account charges.
also, some fees are removed if you have more than £30k across all your accounts (eg. SIPP and ISA).
The revamped mobile app is now a credible app (replacing the old one that wasn't).
Good quality back office service.

Now the but... the trading platform is let down by inability to place either Good Til Cancelled Orders or Dated orders that every other online broker provides. A major disadvantage over other broker offerings.