iii UK share dealing, ISAs, SIPPs and free portfolio tools

iii.co.uk is one of the UK's leading financial websites. The site is well established (I joined in 1997) and has a wealth of tools for managing every aspect of your personal finances. Here's some of the features of Interactive Investor's UK financial website.

The trading and portfolio tools on iii's UK site are really impressive. The free portfolio service allows you to record and monitor the performance of your stocks and other holdings. It's possible to set alerts so that you get a notification if the stock exceeds or falls below a level you set. This is great for monitoring stocks you want to buy or sell at a certain price.

If charting's your thing, there's a full range of stock charts for pretty much all of the constituents of the London Stock Exchange. FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 stocks can be charted in excellent detail. Obviously due to the reduced liquidity of small cap stocks plus the larger bid/spread prices the data for these smaller companies doesn't chart so well.

As well as stocks you can also chart a wide range of ETFs including the full range of iShares ETFs. It's also possible to chart the ETFS Securities range of commodity ETCs including ETFS Gold, ETFS Crude Oil and the agricultural and livestock based funds.

There are also many overseas stocks listed, as well as a wide range of stock indicies like the FTSE 100 (UKX).

There are a multitude of charting options for stock charts you create on iii. You're able to plot them in a range of sizes. If there's sufficient data available then you can plot weekly rather than daily charts. This is great as a lot of small investors like to trade based on the weekly charts.

iii's stock software offers a wide range of stock chart indicators. The most basic of these is the moving averages. Moving averages can be customised to fit any time frame you can think of and not just the frequently used 20 and 50 intervals. Both simple and exponential moving averages are supported. Bollinger Bands can also be drawn on a stock chart - I'm a big fan of these. There are also other options including MACD and a variety of other oscillators and indicators.

iii stock charts also have various options for displaying stock prices, including the opening, high, low and closing price stick models as well as the Japanese candlestick chart type.

That's not all though. iii also has a fair amount of data for UK based unit trusts. Much of the data goes back for 5 years. You can chart many of the popular funds from a wide range of popular fund managers including Jupiter, Schroeders, Fidelity, Invesco and Newton. Obviously unit trusts are only priced on a daily basis so the stock charts for unit trusts are a bit more limited in scope. You can still however chart unit trusts and display moving averages as well as other indicators such as Bollinger Bands. Other oscillators and indicators can also be used including MACD and RSI. You can also display your purchase price data on the chart so you can see how much your unit trusts have increased or decreased in value.

iii's discussion forums have been going for years, and they get a lot of visitors. The boards for FTSE 100 stocks get a particularly large amount of messages posted each day. So if you want to chat about UK stocks and shares then it's hard to beat iii's discussion forums. The Fool financial site also has some good boards (particularly in the personal finance area) but their stock discussion boards aren't as good.

iii offer a range of tax efficient savings accounts, including stocks and shares based Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) and Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs). ISAs are a great way to invest your spare cash away from the prying eyes of the taxman! Income from an ISA is tax free, and you don't even have to mention it on your self assessment tax return.

iii offers a great stock trading service. The service is fairly basic, but the great thing about it is there's a flat rate fee for share dealing. This makes it much more economical when trading larger amounts of shares compared to using a tiered fee system such as that charged by Hargreaves Landsdown.

It is possible to automate the buying and selling of shares - there is a fee for this service but the fee is deducted from any eventual dealing charges.

iii has a wide range of other financial services including:

• CFD (Contracts for Difference) trading
• Spread Betting
• Financial news and commentary
• Video based commentary
• Forex Trading
• Foreign Exchange Services
• Live and Streaming Share Prices

I hope you enjoy the wide range of services that the UK's leading financial website provides. If you want free portfolio tools and want to participate in stock discussions then make sure you give iii's UK website a go.

The author of this article is not authorised by the UK authorities to give financial advice. This article is for information only does not consitute financial advice. Before making investment decisions consult an independent financial advisor.