The smarter way to invest

We are always listening to our clients and continue to develop our app and service offering. There are many new features we are aiming to add at InvestEngine.

To keep up to date with these releases, as well as give us feedback for any developments you’d like to see, please use our Community page, follow us on our social pages (listed below) and follow our blog.

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We can’t always give an exact time frame as to when clients suggestions may be released as a new feature but when we do we’ll be sure to let our clients know.

InvestEngine is an online investment platform that helps individuals and smaller companies invest in the stock market and build better long‑term portfolios. 

Specialising in exchange‑traded funds (ETFs), a type of investment fund that’s fast becoming a leading way to invest in shares and stock markets, bonds, gold and more; we offer a choice of do‑it‑yourself investing and managed investment portfolios. 

Our DIY service lets you build and manage your own portfolio from hundreds of ETFs from iShares, Vanguard and other leading investment brands.

Easy‑to‑use tools and features allow you to invest in a couple of clicks and automate your wealth generation. 

Alternatively, with our Managed Portfolio service, we build and manage an investment portfolio for you from a range of ten portfolios that invest for growth. 

These portfolios invest across a selection of stock markets and investment types using low‑cost ETFs, ensuring your portfolio is widely diversified to help manage risks. 

We help you find a suitable portfolio from this range using a straightforward questionnaire that assesses your aspirations and how much risk you’re comfortable taking.

And as markets rise and fall, we keep your portfolio under constant review to ensure it remains well‑positioned for the latest investment conditions — including rebalancing your holdings to maintain the overall risk level. 

You can find out more about how InvestEngine helps you invest here.

Our platform and services are built around what we think are good investment principles for individuals putting their money to work in the stock market (and smaller companies seeking to make more from their reserves). These principles include: 

Invest for the long term 

While stock markets can go up or down in the short‑term, in the long term they tend to rise. So investing for the long‑term makes sense. It’s less risky, and means you’re more likely to end up with a good return that beats cash savings and outpaces inflation. 

Keep costs down

Costs matter in investment, especially over the long term. Simply put, the less you pay the more of your investment gains you get to keep. Don’t assume that paying more will give you better performance. 

Spread risk 

As with putting eggs in one basket, we think it’s risky to have all your money in a single share or investment. Investing in a diversified portfolio helps reduce risk and smooth your returns. Among the reasons we like ETFs, which commonly hold hundreds of shares or bonds, is their inbuilt diversification. 

Suit yourself

We want you to invest in a way that suits you: how involved you want to be in managing your investments and how much risk you’re comfortable taking. It’s why we offer a choice of DIY investing and Managed Portfolios. Our DIY service has a range of free tools and features to help investors manage their own portfolios, from automating investing to one‑click rebalancing. If you’d rather use our Managed service, there’s a straightforward online questionnaire to help you find a suitable portfolio. 

Stick to the plan 

As markets rise and fall, the investments held in a portfolio can get out of line with their original weights, changing the amount of risk you’re exposed to. That’s why our Managed service includes regular rebalancing of your investments to reset your portfolio, keeping it on track to meet its objectives. For DIY investors, our one‑click rebalancing tool is a convenient way to realign your portfolio. 

We think investing in the stock market should be for the long term. Many experts say you should only consider investing if you will not need to withdraw your money for at least five years, and preferably longer. 

In the short term stock markets can go up or down. If you need to make a withdrawal when share prices are down, you could make a loss. 

By comparison, stock markets tend to rise over the long term. So taking a long view makes sense. Long‑term investing is less risky and means you’re more likely to end up with a good return that beats cash savings and outpaces inflation. 

Investing for the long term also offers the potential to benefit from the arithmetical ‘magic’ of compound returns. 

For example, if your portfolio grows at an average of 7% a year, it will double in value over 10 years. Then, at the same 7% annual growth rate, it will double again over the next 10 years — meaning your portfolio has quadrupled in value over 20 years. Then, another 10 years on it will have doubled again, so that after a total of 30 years your portfolio is worth eight times its original value!

InvestEngine is designed to give you unbeatable value and the benefit of long‑term portfolio investing. We believe this will give you more investing success than a service that encourages frequent short‑term trading.

Our DIY platform allows you to place orders up until 2 pm each business day. We then combine all the orders for a specific ETF and invest them in one go.

This process keeps costs down, allowing us to offer commission‑free investing for all.

Our low costs mean you keep more of your investment gains, and over time this cost saving can really add up.

One of the first decisions you need to make as an investor is whether to follow an ‘active’ or ‘passive’ investment strategy.

Active investing means picking individual stocks – either by paying to use an investment manager or doing it yourself through a broker. An investment manager, for instance, will make judgement calls based on their personal view of the market or the prospects of an individual stock.

This translates into buying and selling stocks on a regular basis – and trying to time the market to identify the best times to be in the market and when to get out.

The trouble with active investing is finding an investment manager who will consistently beat the market; not to mention the high fees they charge for their services.

Passive investing, meanwhile, is rapidly gaining in popularity – and is set to overtake active investing soon, according to Bloomberg.

In a nutshell, it is the complete opposite of active investing, with passive investors believing that individual stock picking and market timing are something of a fool’s errand. Accepted research over many decades backs this view up.

Instead, passive investors rely on a long‑term strategy of buying and holding a portfolio of securities – very often in a range of asset classes – that track broader market indices. This enables them to reap the benefits of market gains and at a fraction of the cost of an active investment manager.

ETFs have facilitated this rise in passive investing; offering a cheap and easy way to invest in multiple asset classes.

We make no bones about it, we do not attempt to time the markets.

Unless you have a time‑travel machine, there is no sure‑fire way to time the market. Studies have shown that even professional investors cannot time market highs and lows. Investors who try almost always hurt their performance over time.

Instead, we like to keep things simple and invest your money in index‑tracking ETFs. We spread your portfolio across key asset classes and invest for the long term. You just sit back and reap the returns.

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) earned its pioneer Harry Markowitz the Nobel Prize in economics in 1990.

And the investment methodology continues to serve both institutional and individual investors well through all kinds of markets.

MPT allows us to construct an optimal portfolio taking into consideration the relationship between risk and return. One of MPT’s principles states that the more risk you are willing to take on, the greater the returns you are likely to achieve.

So once we know your particular level of risk, we can construct a portfolio that maximises the expected return of that portfolio for a designated level of risk.

Another of its principles states that asset class diversification is crucial to enlarging your returns for the amount of risk that you are comfortable accepting. Under MPT therefore, it is incorrect to consider the potential returns and risks of just a single stock.

This can be illustrated in the following example. A portfolio has two stocks: one that does well when it rains and another that performs well when it doesn’t rain. This means that the portfolio will realise gains come rain or shine. Although this is a simplified example of diversification, it also highlights the importance of choosing the right combination of assets to diversify a portfolio.

InvestEngine is designed to allow you to reap the true benefits of diversification, offering ways to invest in a blend of asset classes, industries, companies and countries to lower your overall market risk. This is because no single asset class performs best in all economic environments and different asset classes tend to react differently to the same event.

Having a diverse portfolio will – by definition – be inherently less risky than holding just a single stock. That is why ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ is sound investment approach that we always apply to your portfolio.

And it is why we use exchange‑traded funds (ETFs) – which can track anything from stock indices to stock market sectors, commodities, currencies and bonds – to help us achieve true diversification.

In addition, long‑term market data continues to validate MPT. It even performed better than most other strategies during the financial crisis. Of course, MPT does not protect you from losses in all markets and does not claim to be able to mitigate ‘systemic risk’. But MPT investors who held fully diversified portfolios saw their losses in 2008 cushioned by holding certain asset classes that weathered the financial storm better.

As with all investing, you have certain investment risks that you will need to consider.

Past performance is not an indicator of future performance and the value of your investments may go down as well as up.

If you want to find out more about your investment risks, please read our risk disclosure statement.

What risks should I be aware of?
Investing involves risks like market volatility and liquidity. ETFs also have spreads and annual charges. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, and you may get back less than you invested.

How can I learn more about investment risks?
Visit our Investment Glossary for a detailed explanation of investment risks and terms.

In addition to our general Terms & Conditions and Risk Disclosure information we also produce key features documents for our product offerings.

•  Managed Portfolios — Key features
•  DIY Portfolios — Key features
  
  
  
  

Our client services team is available via email at support@investengine.com or contact form.

We aim to respond to emails within 2 hours during business hours, but response times may be longer during busy periods.

Our client services team can only be contacted via email and contact form. By focusing on online communication, we’re able to extend our service hours beyond traditional limits, ensuring that we are here to assist you at a time that suits you. If you need additional support over the phone, we’re happy to accommodate this, just drop us an email.

Our Client Support team are available Monday‑ Friday 5:30 am to 11 pm and Saturday ‑ Sunday 7 am to 10 pm. 

You can also contact us via our social pages:

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