Does anyone know the advantages of holding stock market investments within a ltd company structure.

Currently i fill my annual ISA allowance and am limited by SIPP contributions to 3600 grossed up due to the nature of my income.

Further investments have been made in GIA accounts so far, however i am considering selling my few buy to let investments and would be investing these monies into the stock market slowly. I am wondering if setting up a ltd company will have advantages as a long term strategy. I need to understand how both stocks with no dividend income and those with dividend income would be treated in a ltd structure. Does the company pay corporation tax on unrealised profits?

Note i do have an accountant and will be asking them at some point but i want to knowledge up a bit beforehand. Appreicate any guidance from those that have thought about this or are using a LTD company for their investments.

Thanks Tim i will give those a read.

I have red one of monevators previous articles on FIC but will need to refresh my brain cells on the topic .I certainly am nowhere near being a additional tax payer or will be anytime soon so it may be a non event in any case. My other reason for considering a company structure is that it would help with IHT planning by being able to assign capital to other people through different share classes. Bascially with them being able to benefit from growth from that point forward . Im no expert but i recall this is a potential advantage of smart company (alphabet ) shares. If all this is not beneficial for my personal sutuation then i will just have to be better at structuring my investments between ISA/SIPP and GIA.

Once issue i found is that my GIA has some high yielding dividend stocks simply because of purchasing at time of good value. For example I had already maxed my ISA account when the REIT's became qattracitv elast year.

My intital thought it would be ideal to have the growth low yielding stocks in the GIA and the higher yielding ones in the sheltered vehicles, but i found this hard to achieve as buying opportunites dont care about my allowances.I have to look at this in greater detail.

I really wish the tax system was much more simpler. i do really find all this too complicated.

Any FIC is almost certainly going to be treated as a “close company” (unless the ownership was VERY distributed, maybe). The usual concern about that label is where you have an actual proper “trading company” (trading in the sense of “doing something useful”) which starts to do some investing on the side… and then finds itself subject to the close company classification (and so cut off from various reliefs and lower rates), which is why sites like Foxy always recommend setting up a separate company/SPV to do the investing, unless the company is done with the trading side. But anyone setting up an FIC should be expecting it to be a “close company” from the start; I’m not sure why it seems to be regarded as such a terrifying thing… IIRC the issues are mainly that you don’t get to use things like EIS or BPR reliefs or lower “small profits” corporation tax rates (arguably it’s actually a simpler tax regime, because all that sort of fine detail isn’t available).