Are you stacked up with cash in your ISAs, SIPPs, and direct portfolios? As a dedicated follower of fashion (if the markets are falling as investors sell, then so do I) it is of some concern that the cash is not earning any interest. There was some relatively good news yesterday from soon to be listed A.J.Bell Youinvest. They are increasing the interest they pay on cash held in portfolios. Previously you got 0.05% on balances more than £50,000. It will now be 0.10% above £10,000, 0.15% above £50,000 and 0.25% above £100,000 on SIPPs and similar increases on ISAs and dealing accounts.
But that is still really quite paltry and still not good enough when you can get over 0.2% on even High Street bank deposit accounts and Goldman Sach’s Marcus account is offering 1.5%. Youinvest and other platforms must try harder I suggest to offer fair interest rates. In the meantime, the only option for investors is to take the cash out and deposit it elsewhere or spend it. But moving cash out of ISAs and SIPPs can make it difficult to put back in. The rules on such accounts should surely be changed to permit that more generally because at present it is “anti-competitive”. One option is to transfer your ISA or SIPP to another provider who does provide a better rate of interest on cash holdings, but that is such a tortuous and expensive process at present that it’s not really very practical to do so – at least the FCA is looking at that issue.
Why are investors selling? Apart from panics in certain stocks and sectors, such as the FAANG technology stocks in the USA, the political uncertainty in the UK is surely simply causing investors to take their money off the table. Folks are getting nervous. Reducing exposure to stocks likely to be hit by a hard Brexit or by the risk of a General Election and Labour taking power is a completely rational move. Private investors can do this quite easily while institutional investors apart from hedge funds can be more limited in their ability to do so. Investors in funds don’t like their funds to be holding large amounts of cash and the manager cannot easily move in and out of holdings in size without finding prices move against them.
Wey Education (WEY) is an AIM listed provider of on-line education. It has big ambitions but this morning the company announced that Executive Chairman David Massie has resigned with immediate effect. The cause is continuing health problems after major heart surgery. They also reported trading as “strong” but this will clearly be a major disruption in the short term as Mr Massie was undoubtedly the driving force behind the business of late. It rather highlights the danger of having an Executive Chairman in a company rather than a more conventional board structure. The share price is down 11% at the time of writing. This was one of my “experimental” small holdings where the picture has simply not developed as I hoped – that’s apart from the latest news. One concern here is that the company did not announce the fact that Mr Massie was only working part-time because of his health problems recently – surely this is “price-sensitive” information that should have been issued?
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) have announced an investigation into the audit of the last 3 years accounts of Patisserie Holdings (CAKE) by Grant Thornton. They are also looking into the preparation of the financial statements by the former CFO. With the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the FCA also involved, the management of the company are going to be spending a lot of time talking to investigators. Let us hope that does not detract too much from putting the company back on a sound basis.
Patisserie has also been accused of failing to declare LTIP share awards to executives including the former CFO. Will there be action on that matter? I wrote a previous blog article on how they do things differently in the USA after the conviction of a former Autonomy executive for fraud – see https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/regulations-and-law/they-do-things-differently-in-the-usa/ . They also do things differently in Japan where Carlos Ghosn, Chairman of Nissan, has been arrested for misreporting his pay. Allegedly he actually received over $88 million over the last five years but only half was reported in their accounts. It is surely true that the UK is really quite “soft” on corporate misdemeanors of all kinds when it should be a lot tougher.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
