Selecting Your Investments, ISAs and Funds
Best Price FS help guide you through the Investments, ISAs and Funds selection process.

Our new online platform for Investments, ISAs and Funds now allows you to take full control of your investment portfolio. Best Price FS allows you to create your own Portfolio using the Cofunds Online Platform and manage your Investments carefully. You can purchase all your Investments, ISAs and Funds online with no hassle, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Best Price guide to Selecting Your Funds

Before You Start

Best Price Financial Services provides an online ISA investment application through market leaders Cofunds. Knowing a little about Investments, ISAs and Funds will help if you decide to buy your own funds and create your own portfolio.

This is an non-advisory website and will only provide guidance information for all our visitors. If you are unsure about investing online and doing it yourself, we can point you in the right direction for some advice, please contact Best Price Advice on .

How Does The System Work?

Best Price Financial Services gives you the choice of over 1000 funds from more than 75 fund managers. Once you've registered and logged in, you can access detailed information on them, including graphs showing performance and fund fact sheets.

To make your online investment easier, you could choose one of our Best Price Funds List. Or maybe you would like to choose one of our Professionally Outsourced Portfolios? It's entirely up to you.

How Do I Analyse My Investments?

The system is provided on our online web application through Cofunds. Once you log in you will be able to keep track of your investments and move funds within companies.

How Do I Register?

Registration is open to investors who already have holdings placed on the Cofunds platform by us. If you're unsure whether you are eligible to register for this service then please contact us.

If you have received a registration letter from Cofunds, then you can simply proceed directly to the log in page. If you haven't received a registration letter, but you have a Cofunds customer number, then you can apply to sign up for the service using our registration page.

Once you've registered an email is sent to you to confirm that your registration has been successful. As a security measure, your log in details will be sent to your postal address.

Selection Process

Best Price Financial Services recognise that past performance is not a guide for future performance and plays a small role in our funds selection process. Whilst not being able to see into the future we work to a stringent five point selection criteria to make sure that we recommend the best possible funds with the potential to provide your investments with upside when compared to average investment funds available. The process is as follows:

Ratings Agency

A key part of our selection process is to study the output of the rating agencies against the funds. These organisations have huge resources and high levels of access to fund groups and fund managers.

Criteria For Selection

Each recommended fund must have a minimum OBSR rating of A (where possible). They consider OBSR as the most important rating due to the fact that the rating takes into consideration all of the funds attributes when awarding a rating. A minimum of an A rating means that in accordance with OBSR each of their recommended funds is at least a highly commended fund by OBSR. An addition of a Citywire rating of A and above for the fund manager is also desirable but not essential as not all managers will be rated by Citywire.

Risk Adjusted Returns

All funds over three years old carry a Crown Rating provided by specialist rating service Financial Express. They are an authority on performance measurement and they provide Crown Ratings for all UK authorised unit trusts and OEIC funds. Crown Ratings are compiled using three key measurements of a fund’s performance – alpha, volatility and consistency. Funds in a given sector are rated with the highest scoring funds receiving three crowns and the lowest scoring funds receiving one crown. Any fund not meeting the required characteristics does not receive a crown.

The Crown Ratings are designed to highlight funds within the same sector that have had superior consistent performance in relation to risk. Hence they can be a useful indicator to the investor of those fund managers that have added value and provided good performance in relation to the risk that they have taken.

Criteria For Selection

Funds which make our recommended funds short list will have their Crown Rating compared against their peers, a minimum criteria of at least a Two Crown Rating is desirable.

Relative Risk

Volatility (Beta) is a statistical measure of how often a series of values move up and down around its average. The higher the volatility number (Beta) the less consistent historical performance has been. Therefore we are looking for funds that have performed with as little volatility as possible.

Criteria For Selection

A fund with a Beta of 1 is said to be representative of its markets volatility. As above, the Beta of our recommended funds will be assessed to make certain that they are not taking too much risk away from their benchmark risk. Funds that make their recommended funds shortlist which have a Beta close to 1 will be favoured above others.

Consistency of Performance

As we have already established past performance is not a guide for future performance. What is useful however is to establish which funds have generated consistent performance. To assess this we look at discrete & cumulative quartile rankings over the following time periods:

1 year from 36 months ago
1 year from 60 months ago
Rankings of 1 and 2 are above average and rankings 3 and 4 are below average.

Criteria For Selection

Each recommended funds performance must be above average in their sector over the longer term, thus they require funds to be a minimum of 2^nd quartile and above on both a 3 and 5 year cumulative basis.

Representativeness of the Asset Class

For the asset allocation to maintain its validity it’s important we choose funds that fit the sector reasonably closely. If they fit the sector exactly they effectively track the performance of the sector and are in passive funds. It is possible to calculate an estimate of the potential to outperform the sector from the extent and consistency by which a fund is above or below average. Clearly we are not looking for funds that vary widely from the sector for this would upset the asset allocation principles; however a little variance provides the opportunity to outperform the sector.