General News

Oxford Technology VCTs and Scottish Independence

Today the two Oxford Technology VCTs that were threatened with withdrawal of VCT status have announced that the changes required by HMRC to enable them to retain VCT status have been achieved and accepted by HMRC. Presumably that has required the disposal of some of the Scancell shares that were the source of the difficulty and that has been confirmed in the announcements. This therefore probably concludes the campaign on these VCTs that ShareSoc mounted as there has been an almost complete ...

Better Finance Press Release and ESMA Report

Yesterday Better Finance (a European representative body for individual shareholders of which ShareSoc is a member) issued a press release. It is worth repeating here:"European Financial Regulator fails to recognise the mounting losses hitting European savers and investors - Brussels, 4 September 2014Better Finance welcomes the new "Trends, Risks and Vulnerabilities" report released today by the European Securities & Markets Authority (ESMA).But the ESMA press release does not say a word about individual investors’ trends and risks.Moreover, and of additional concern, ...

Cyber threats and how to avoid them

The International Organisation of Securities Commissions (Iosco) has warned about the growing threats of cyber attacks to financial institutions. The Chairman, Greg Medcraft, has warned that there needs to be a much more concerted effort to tackle such threats. For example disruption of a stock exchange for any length of time could have serious consequences. Securities regulators who are members of Iosco are seeing increased attacks with more than half of securities exchanges being the subject of one or more. The closure ...

Good news from Hargreaves Lansdown

Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) have issued a press release announcing changes to their Vantage service. It mentions that they "listen carefully to their feedback" from clients and invest heavily in improvements. Some of the latest changes that may be of particular interest to readers include the following (refer to the HL web site for the complete list) : - Removal of the recently introduced corporate action fee including the charge for voting shares. - Free live share prices. - An on-line tax centre to help ...

AIM and other regulatory changes

Effective from the 11th August, there are additional requirements under AIM Rule 26. Rule 26 covers what information is required to be published on a company's web site - for example the listing prospectus and last Annual Report. In future a company must disclose what corporate governance code the company is using, or not as the case may be. Currently AIM companies often refer to the Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) Corporate Governance Code for Small and Mid-Size Quoted Companies, some use ...

Members’ Conference Call

ShareSoc is keen to engage with its members. We appreciate that it is not always easy for all our members to get to our members’ meetings, which are the primary forum for discussion about the issues we are tackling on behalf of our membership, and the services we offer.Therefore, we would like to offer our full members the opportunity to communicate their wishes and concerns via a telephone conference call. This will take place at 7pm on 10th September. Full members ...

Active managers and Monks Investment Trust

The FT’s fund management supplement recently reported that “90% of UK active funds beat the market”. This headline might surprise you because historically it is known that active fund...

Controlling bankers – public consultation in motion

Controlling bankers is a key theme of a public consultation issued jointly by the Bank of England Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The proposals...

Delays in SIPP and ISA transfers

I commented on the delays in transferring a SIPP from Hargreaves Lansdown to another provider in the May ShareSoc Newsletter, and we published some letters from other members on similar problems in the June Newsletter. I thought readers might like to know that the original SIPP transfer has now finally completed. It actually took over 5 calendar months to get all the portfolio holdings to transfer (this being an "in-specie" transfer as it is called). This is clearly a quite ridiculous period ...

High pound also impacts Renishaw and GlaxoSmithKline

Following on from my blog post a couple of days ago about the high pound impacting the profits of technology companies, yesterday saw final results from Renishaw (RSW) and interims from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) which reflected the same issue. However, the currency impact in both companies was not the main impact on the subsequent share price move. At Renishaw, profits would have been £6.8m higher on top of an "adjusted" figure of £70.1m for the year, but for the currency impact. Last years ...

High pound impacts Croda, Abcam and others

Today Croda issued their interim results for the six months to the end of June. Croda is a speciality chemicals company and less than 10% of its revenue arises in the UK. A very substantial proportion comes from the USA and from other dollar denominated sales elsewhere. The high pound (currently over $1.70 to the pound) is having a big impact on companies such as Croda. In the six month figures revenue in constant currency terms is up 2.5% and operating ...

Shareholder Class Actions

The topic of shareholder class actions is a controversial one. Before ShareSoc participates in any such actions, on behalf of its members, we therefore wish to obtain the views of our membership on this subject. We will shortly poll all our members, including associates, to ask your views. If you would like to cast a vote, and receive the other benefits that ShareSoc offers, but are not already a member, you can join us here: www.sharesoc.org/membership/ The poll will be e-mailed ...