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New VCT Rules and Knowledge Intensive Businesses

I attended the Annual General Meeting of Northern Venture Trust (NVT) yesterday - one of the more successful VCTs. Management representative Tim Levett gave us a briefing on the impact of the new "draconian rules" (as he called them) for VCTs arising from EU regulations. His criticism also arose from the fact that the legislation is effectively retrospective as it impacts both "old money" from past fund raisings and new money. One particular oddity is that the amount of money than can ...

When Brokers Go Bust

"When Brokers Go Bust" was the title of a fascinating article in Investors Chronicle on 11/12/2015. It covered the impact on investors when their stockbroker goes out of business. That's pretty uncommon you might think. But it revealed the surprising fact that in the last five years alone more than 400 investment firms have gone belly up, based on data from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). It spelled out two particular problems: 1) the difficulty in untangling pooled nominee accounts (which ...

CentralNic Placing Annoys Private Investors

This morning (8/12/2015), CentralNic Group announced the acquisition of Australian company Instra Group. Total cost is AU$33 million payable in cash and shares which will be supported by a mixture of debt and the issuance of new shares in a placing. Overall the new shares to be issued to the sellers and to institutional investors will represent 31% of the new overall equity so there is substantial dilution of existing investors taking place. But what is likely to annoy private investors is ...

A Warning – 1875 Finance

Several ShareSoc directors have been called recently by someone claiming to represent "1875 Finance". To prove their bona-fides they even quote your own log-in information for a well known financial web site - yes they will even tell you the password which to any sensible person should immediately arise suspicion. 1875 Finance is an financial organisation based in Geneva, Switzerland. But they are not registered with the FCA to do business in the UK and have no connection with the aforementioned financial ...

EU Commission Proposes Overhaul of Prospectus Rules

The EU Commission has published proposals to overhaul the rules on prospectuses, where companies are raising equity or debt in public markets. But prospectuses are costly to produce, especially for smaller companies.  As Ian Sayers of the AIC said after the above announcement: "One of the main problems with a prospectus is that the regime effectively compels issuers to include any information that an investor might conceivably want. Given the legal implications, the result is a huge amount of boilerplate of ...