Andrew Bresler, Saxo UK CEO On Winning Best Investing Account 2026

AI Generated Transcript

Holly Mead (00:04)
Welcome to Good Money Guide. My name is Holly Meade and today we are talking to Andrew Bresler. He is UK CEO of Saxo, which has just been voted best investing account in our 2026 investing awards.

Andrew Bresler (00:16)
Good morning Holly, thank you for having me. Thank you very much, very exciting, it’s lovely to get another award from the Good Money Guy.

Holly Mead (00:22)
And last time you were here with us, you’d only just really joined Saxo as CEO. That was a year ago. Tell us what’s been happening since.

Andrew Bresler (00:31)
Well, it feels like a lifetime ago. We’ve done a lot in the last year and a little bit. Yes, they certainly have. But I mean, I’m really loving it. It’s such a fantastic market for us to be involved in in the UK and really there’s so much opportunity ahead of us. the investing award is such a testament to some of the work that we’ve been doing. So I’m really excited to talk about that. We’ve got a brand new majority shareholder, which was closed as of last week in the form of J. Safra Sarasin.

Holly Mead (00:36)
They’ve really got their pound of flesh out of you.

Andrew Bresler (01:00)
That’s super exciting for us. really brings sort of Alfintech agility together with their banking stability. They’ve been around 185 years and I think the combined group now has assets of over 500 billion. So it’s a really substantial organization now and we’re super excited about what that means for our future.

Holly Mead (01:16)
Nice and also last time we spoke to you the investing account had not long been launched so kudos on the award so quickly but what’s going so right?

Andrew Bresler (01:25)
Oh, we’ve done a lot on that. I’m super, super pleased with it. yeah. So last time we spoke, I Saxo is really known for its sort of Genesis in trading and trading apps. We’ve won CFD broker. We’ve done a best futures broker, one best bond broker. We’ve won best direct market access broker. Yeah, we should. But all of those with good money guide. so, and that sort of speaks to our Genesis story, 18 months ago or so we launched our Saxo investing app in the UK, investor app in the UK.

Holly Mead (01:41)
scouts with all the bad

Andrew Bresler (01:53)
And that really is a sort of trim back version, super simplified, cash only products within it. And it’s been really successful. We’ve seen in conjunction with that launch, we launched a flexible ISA solution. And so now our investor style clients are outstripping our trader type clients by 41. So we’ve really acquired a lot of clients within that space. We have grown our ISA clients by 40%, 46 % in asset terms over the last year.

So we’ve really been able to lean into that story, sort of underpinned by this proposition. We’ve done a lot in terms of price cutting as well. I think we’ve kind of starting to capture the attention in not only the trader space where we’ve been known for a long time, but now really in the investor space as well. So it’s very exciting time for us.

Holly Mead (02:36)
And I how do you attract attention and customers in a space that is, A, really competitive, but also has some big incumbent players?

Andrew Bresler (02:47)
Yeah, it’s a great question because it’s not a simple challenge, right? We’re a smaller player and we spend a lot less money than some of the big players. But I think it really comes down to the strength of your proposition. We can spend a little time talking about that, but equally really knowing about who you’re going after in the UK market, right? The UK market is big, it’s very diverse. People are coming to investing, self-directed investing platforms for very different reasons. And so really identifying who you want to be to whom and then going after them in a really sort of proactive…

approach that speaks to your sort of USP that we have. And so at Saxo, we really pride ourselves on the sort of multi-asset capabilities that we bring to you. And there’s so much that comes out of that from a multi-asset perspective. Maybe we can speak a little about that.

Holly Mead (03:29)
I mean, last time you were saying, I thought it was really interesting that your customer base was very male, very middle aged. Have you seen a shift there in the past year?

Andrew Bresler (03:37)
Not massively. mean, it remains the same, but we’ve lent into sort of some slightly different partnerships that we think are underserved. So we’ve got a great partnership with female invest. We’ve seen a sort of a nice inflow of clients from from them. But really the sort of the demographics hasn’t particularly changed. What we really want to be is kind of within that space. Right. So people that have got some degree of financial acumen, they savvy, they understand the markets, they’re sophisticated traders or savvy investors. They’re in the sort of 40 to 60.

⁓ age bracket because they’ve got a little bit more money to put to work and they kind of understand how to put that money to work and then they come to a platform that gives them all that optionality to put money to work in all parts of the world and that’s really what Saxa can give them.

Holly Mead (04:20)
We know the government’s on a drive to get people investing, they’re about to start a big campaign on that. Are you going to ride on the coattails of that?

Andrew Bresler (04:27)
100%. I think it’s a fantastic for us from a business perspective. It’s very exciting, but equally it’s a super super important initiative from a government perspective, right? There’s a massive advice gap in the UK and the introduction of targeted support is a very, I think, forward thinking way of ⁓ tackling that particular problem. And so we’re going to lean into that. We’re going to apply for our extended licensing permissions that we need in order to service those clients.

and I think we’ll bring a really valuable solution to our clients in that space. So we’re excited about that too.

Holly Mead (05:01)
So talk to me about the app. What’s the best feature in the app from your perspective?

Andrew Bresler (05:05)
Yes, I mentioned multi-asset ⁓ and really I’m not going to talk about a feature but rather sort of what we bring to market and it’s all underpinned by that sort of multi-asset capabilities and so we kind of go to market with two stories. Number one, we allow you to maximize your returns, right? And maximizing returns is kind of made up of one, I’m not paying too many fees within that so we’ve made major investments in our fee structure, we’ve reduced minimums.

We recently have reduced our mutual fund costs so that it’s actually cheaper to buy a Vanguard fund with us than it is to buy it with Vanguard. And so we’re really trying to disrupt the market from a fees perspective. But the other side of maximizing your returns is the opportunities that you get. Why would you go to a broker that doesn’t allow you to invest in, for example, Asia, which is a growth engine of the world, or doesn’t allow you to sell a covered call against some of your call-long strategies and enhance the yield of that portfolio? That’s a strength that Saxa has because we have such a wide ⁓ offering from an asset.

perspective. The other part that we really lean into as a self-directed platform is the idea of really giving clients control and the ability to control how they invest. And so we’ve got a deep range of features within our platforms from anything from investing themes where we’ve got a curated list of specific investment themes that if you can’t figure out what you want to invest in, but you can recognize a theme, you can go after that. We’ve got really advanced charting, advanced analytics. We’ve got amazing strats in there. So

Everything you need to make the right decisions for your financial future also lives and breathes within the app. And so we maximize your opportunities and we give you control to make the best decisions.

Holly Mead (06:36)
Well, you’ve brought me on nicely to a question I was going to ask later down the line, but let’s do it now. And that is what are some of the biggest themes for investors in 2026? Because it’s already been quite a chaotic year.

Andrew Bresler (06:48)
It has been a chaotic year. So I looked before we came and the best performing themes in our curated themes basket last year were oil and gas, no surprises there. ⁓ The ⁓ commodities, so that was no surprises. And then actually crypto ⁓ and all things blockchain. That was over the last year. In the last month, we’ve seen defense really perform. Again, no surprises on that. We’ve seen oil and gas again perform as that sort of rocketed. And so…

I think the theme will really be defined, the best investing theme for this year will be defined by how long this Middle Eastern conflict goes on for. The longer it goes on for, the greater disruption there is to energy markets and therefore the greater macroeconomic impacts. And so you start talking about rate cut cycles turn into rate hike cycles, and that really changes the investing dynamics of the market. So I think all depends on what happens over the coming weeks and how long and protracted this Iranian conflict turns out to be.

Holly Mead (07:45)
Yeah. So you mentioned you’ve been looking at your fees. How important is that for investors and how underestimated do you think that can be?

Andrew Bresler (07:54)
I think it’s very important, but it’s not the most important. So it’s very easy to lean into the idea of the cheapest zero cost, no fee structure as a business model. But I’m not sure that necessarily aligns both customer and the business together. They often are diametrically opposed to one another. And fees are, of course, super important when you’re making an investing decision so you don’t eat away at your returns. But hopefully what…

you should be doing is finding the best possible investments where the fees are only a de minimis part of the total return that you’re looking to get. And so that’s where I go back to sort of this maximizing your returns, how much of an opportunity set is there available within the platform? And so fees are a very important input, but they’re not the primary output and the output is the returns that you get overall.

Holly Mead (08:44)
And so you’ve got a huge span within the app. You said you’ve got multi-asset, but then over here you’ve got blockchain and covered calls. Where’s the most popular areas for your customers?

Andrew Bresler (08:56)
Yeah, so our clients ⁓ predominantly are in stocks, right? That’s where we see the most activity in stocks globally. ⁓ What we’re starting to see more of, which I’m really excited about because we’ve been pushing that story, is sort of more of a diversification from a single stock into multi-asset type of structures. And so the move is quite easy from stocks into ETFs, from ETFs into funds, and then adding yield enhancing strategies on top of that light cover call. So we’re seeing a decent amount of exchange traded options being done.

We’re seeing futures and CFDs used as hedging instruments to some of the volatility that we’re seeing. And so that’s really, I think, a critical part of the whole story is that ability to move from one asset to the next and then ⁓ not to dine out on that too much, but we really see that having an aligned outcome for us as a business, but for the clients, right? So a great stat that I looked at before I came is those clients that are in a single asset class, just stocks, for example, right? ⁓

half, so 48 % of those clients tend to be unprofitable. As you move along that value chain, so you add an ETF or you add a mutual fund or you add a bond to your portfolio, moving from one asset class to three means you go from 48 % unprofitable to 27 and once you’re above seven asset classes, it’s only 9 % unprofitable. So the value of that ⁓ sort of breadth of it is really important and so the major things that we see clients trading is predominantly stocks and then ETFs and then outside of that we see

⁓ a little bit of sort of futures and options.

Holly Mead (10:28)
And you mentioned crypto and blockchain. Obviously we’ve seen a big sell-off in that space over last couple of months. What’s the sort of interest level there and what trends are you seeing?

Andrew Bresler (10:40)
Yeah, so we only offer sort of a very small amount of crypto assets to our professional clients. We recently launched crypto ETNs in line with the FCA’s deregulation of some of those and we’ve seen some uptake in that. Crypto is not a big part of our story, but it’s a big part of maybe what investors are looking at and how they get either secondary exposure through a broker like us. So they’re looking at some of the listed equity names that then provide solutions to crypto. So for example, your crypto exchanges that are listed, et cetera.

And so we do see a lot of interest in that. We see a lot of interest in that, think, largely driven by those that are seeking high octane returns, because there tends to be higher volatility within that space than there is in other places. And so it’s a part of the story, but it’s not the whole story for us.

Holly Mead (11:25)
What is, do you think, the biggest mistake you see people making ⁓ among your investment base?

Andrew Bresler (11:31)
I love this question because it’s the same mistake that you could have asked me 10 or 15 years ago and it is the same mistake that people make today and that really is running your losers and cutting your winners, right? I looked up our two most profitable traders last year who had very successful years. I looked at the most profitable traders sort of dispersion between their losers and their winners and how much they make. So his top three winners ⁓ were in order of magnitude

greater than his biggest losers by 40 times, 27 times and five times. That means he’s running his losers 40 times less than what he’s running his winners. And so really leaning into the winning positions and maximizing your returns on that and then cutting your, your losers really quickly because you’ve got that got that wrong, right? The best traders are making between sort of 55 and 60 % of their bets correctly. And so being able to quickly turn off the ones that aren’t performing and

really lean into the ones and maximize the returns are the ones that are has been the difference between good investors and bad investors. Whether you’re trading or investing, it’s the same sort of old adage that holds.

Holly Mead (12:38)
So this brings us nicely, I think, to the question of what sort of investor are you with your own portfolio?

Andrew Bresler (12:44)
I’m a bad investor, right? I I’m learning. I’m learning to be better at it. So I think last time I talked about one of my worst trades was sort of penny stocks mining. ⁓ and the, the specific trade is not relevant. What it was is looking in retail fashion at what are, what’s a get rich quick type scheme. So not diversified, not a lot of research that’s gone into it and the hope that this is going to rock it up and be three, four, five times the price that it was. And

the vast majority of times that doesn’t work out. ⁓ And so really what I’ve adopted is to start to use just more of what we’ve got within the platform. I think we have some really good evidence of those clients that tend to engage with us the most. So that are the most curious, right? They’re reading our research. They are engaging with screeners and alerts and all that type of things tend to have better outcomes. And so really being super curious about the specific investment that you’re making and understanding.

why it’s at a certain price point, what other education materials you can read about that. That’s meant clients have much better outcomes. And so from my perspective, I’ve started to just adopt more of the curiosity related to investing. I’ve added more instruments and more sort of diversification to my portfolio. And I think in the current volatile world, that’s been able to serve me quite well.

Holly Mead (14:06)
I think that’s one of the things that puts people off of investing is that it does require some research and groundwork. can’t, you can just go in blindly, but it probably won’t turn out that well. How much effort do you think people have to put in to become a good investor?

Andrew Bresler (14:22)
So I think there’s this gradients to it ⁓ What you shouldn’t do is? Not invest because there’s a hurdle to get in from an education perspective. There are loads of low barrier entries We could just buy a multi-asset mutual fund or a multi-asset ETF and ⁓ And have that diversification and suddenly you’re investing your money’s ⁓

but that’s probably not the best investing decision you can make. You can add onto that and start to get really curious about it. And so it’s really a effort equals outcome ⁓ type dynamic, but it shouldn’t be a barrier to entry that you shouldn’t start investing because there’s some very simple and easy ways to get started where you need almost no knowledge and understanding about that. And really that’s the investor platform that we’ve launched is really about that. It allows you to see, you know, the most simplistic of investments that give you multi-asset global exposure.

and get you started on your investing journey and then you slowly supplement that with as you get more curious you add into that ⁓ education and understanding of different instruments and different ways of tackling the market and then you grow and you ultimately with what we provide I think you can be a client for Saxo for life.

Holly Mead (15:33)
So you mentioned before your penny stocks disaster, but let’s balance it out. What’s one of your best ever investments?

Andrew Bresler (15:41)
All my best ever investment. ⁓ I mean, I don’t think I’ve had one that stands out as like, I wish I’d done more of that, right? The best investments I’ve made are the ones that I’ve put the time into really understanding and then you nurture that like you would a plant in your garden, right? You really spend time understanding it. So I’ve had a really good run in the last year or so on some miners which have been playing to the commodity story. But I’ve done well in that because I’ve understood the miner I’ve understood.

what they produce and really invested time into that. So your best investments are probably the ones that you spend the most time on.

Holly Mead (16:14)
When you’ve had such a good run, how do you deal with that personally of that? Do I crystallize some of this profit in case the trend ends or like you say, do I just lean into it and hope it keeps going?

Andrew Bresler (16:25)
Yeah, so I definitely could have taken a few more leaves out of our best performing clients book in that sense insofar as I tend not to run them as well as I possibly could and probably could have put more money to work in the winners. But I do like to just run the winning trade or investment as long as I can and then trail a stop behind it. So it’s good discipline. It means that if it pulls back below a certain amount of what you’ve identified as a maybe support and resistance zone, then ⁓ it stops you out.

and you crystallize that profit, but if it doesn’t, you continue to enjoy the fruits of that.

Holly Mead (16:57)
And one of the things I wanted to ask you was, you know, we talked about the biggest trends and opportunities for this year, but what are the biggest challenges for investors in the year ahead? And perhaps knowing when those big trends are going to end is one of them.

Andrew Bresler (17:13)
Yeah, I think that the big challenge that we’re seeing is of course the volatility, right? ⁓ There were a couple of years ago. Maybe when we would have first sat down with good money guide Selling the diversification narrative was quite difficult because actually it had necessarily been serving clients that had been in the Nvidia trade that had suddenly gone gangbusters ⁓ and selling a diversification story to that was quite difficult. It’s a much easier sell now because ⁓

There’s a lot of divergence in performance. There’s a lot of volatility. And so I think the challenge really from an investor perspective is managing that volatility. It’s much harder than it was when you’ve got sort of this multi-year bull market that’s running up, particularly as we may be moving, as I mentioned before, from a rate cutting cycle into a rate hiking cycle as there’s this massive disruption to energy markets. And so big macroeconomic changes like that can really sort of the seeds for lots of volatility.

and diverge us in performance. so managing that is going to be a real challenge. I think it means being close to your investments, understanding them a lot, being close to the news and what’s driving those investments and being really disciplined so that you don’t let good performing positions turn into bad performing ones.

Holly Mead (18:22)
It’s also a real sea change for anyone who started investing in the past 10 or even 15 years. That crowded trade in particularly just in the US has been quite an easy win and people might actually be encountering the need to diversify for the first time in their investment careers.

Andrew Bresler (18:41)
100 % that is what’s happening and there will be There’s some very basic things you can do in order to manage that though, right simply as we’ve talked about having a single asset that’s exposed to that ⁓ Type of volatility is a bad investment decision particularly in this environment And so you can just bolt on some hedges around that or some diversification around that and you can make some much better investments But that is an educational gap that maybe some people have had for the last 10 years who’ve been riding a mag-7 trade I think

Changing that into or that makes even trade is no longer what it once was and therefore How do I look at that world differently and that’s education? I think education There are so many tools available both in the platform and outside the platform to help you get over that and that’s really that the key to those That will or the key differentiator what will define sort of the winners and the losers is how much time and curiosity they put in that education I think

Holly Mead (19:33)
Well, and on that theme, something we like to ask everyone is what is a book you’d recommend to anyone trying to learn more about finance or investing? Now you’ve got tricky task here because we asked you last year what your favorite book was. So now we have to bank on the fact that you’ve read at least two books in your life.

Andrew Bresler (19:48)
I have read two books in my life. Actually a client recommended to me, so Michael Lewis is famously a finance book and ⁓ author and I actually read his Going Infinite, The Rise of a New Tycoon, which is the story around Sam Banfield Fried and the crypto story there. It was a fascinating read, a real page turner and what I liked about it is it sort of speaks to that.

idea of get rich quick and fear and greed and it also speaks to the value of having really good governance corporate governance and ⁓ And sort of Chinese wars between the right divisions within your business so that you can manage the types of Outcomes that he had much better I think it would have a very different story with good corporate governance And so in my seat we spend a lot of time talking about corporate governance and that was a real testament to how not to do it

Holly Mead (20:41)
⁓ yeah, big Michael Lewis fan. Haven’t read that one. I’ve read one of the extracts of it when it was… Yeah, that is on my list. We’ll wrap up in a sec, but tell us what is on the horizon for you in the next months and year?

Andrew Bresler (20:45)
Oh, you should really read again, it’s better.

we’ve got lots. So we continue to lean into our investor focus. ⁓ And so we’re in the process of building out an ESIP solution. That means you’ll have in your Saxo account, a fully integrated digital solution that manages both your pension, your ISA and your general investing. We hope to launch that this year. We’re re-looking at some of our pricing again, where we could be more efficient and go after some of those that have been a bit a bit lazy about changing some of their prices.

We’re looking at launching an auto invest feature, which means you can auto invest on a monthly basis into a number of different asset classes across all your tax wrapper accounts. We’re hoping to get that live this year. So we’re building lots of functionality to support the consolidation of assets at a home that really provides multi-asset like Saxo. And so we were leaning into the multi-asset story. We’re building the tools in order to do that and really driving consolidation onto the platform. So we’re super excited what the next year holds for us. Fingers crossed.

Holly Mead (21:48)
So hopefully more awards.

Well, congratulations again and thank you for coming along to talk to us.

Andrew Bresler (21:53)
Thank you very much, Holly, it’s been great.

Holly Mead (21:55)
And thank you for joining us. And if you are a Saxo customer or have any thoughts, feelings or experiences you’d like to share, then head to the Good Money Guide review page and we’d love to hear from you.