Charles Stanley Direct Avis 

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.