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Shareholder Rights Being Eroded

There is a good article in the Financial Times today (Saturday 22/6/2019) which is headlined “UK shareholder rights being eroded”. As the article says, almost no investors who buy shares legally own the shares they have bought, which rather surprises them. That’s because most of them buy via nominee accounts operated by stockbrokers and platforms. Not only that, but most nominee accounts are “pooled” accounts so even identifying who are the “beneficial owners” is not always easy. Does it matter? Yes it ...

Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY) Retail Shareholder Event 14 June 2019

Carla Antunes da Silva, Executive Committee member and Group Strategy, Corporate Ventures and Investors Relations Director and Douglas Radcliffe, Group Investor Relations Director presented to 40 retail shareholders in a highly successful event organised by Lloyds and ShareSoc. After a detailed 45 minute presentation, Carla and Douglas answered questions for 30 minutes, followed by informal discussions and networking over a very pleasant buffet lunch on the 8th floor of the Lloyds head office in Gresham Street overlooking the London skyline. Copies of the presentation ...

Slack IPO, Web Privacy and Sell on Monday

The IPO of Slack in the USA has received a lot of media coverage. This is one of those technology stocks that is on what at first glance is a sky-high valuation. Slack provides workplace collaboration software and last year had revenues of $400 million, and lost $140 million. The market cap is now around $20 billion which means it is valued at about 50 times revenue. Those are the negative numbers. The positive aspect is that it roughly doubled revenue ...

Woodford, FCA, Asset Management

Today the FT reveals that the FCA have launched an investigation in the Woodford Equity Income Fund. Last night in the Evening Standard, Anthony Hilton estimated that only about 200,000 people were invested in Woodford funds, and added "so why all the fuss". I think it is about trust. Most people in the UK do not trust business. For example, it does not help public levels of trust when Woodford takes a £36m dividend (from Woodford Investment Management Limited year end March 2018 ...

VCT Investor Group – Ventus & Ventus 2 VCT Shareholder Resolutions

Examples of egregious fee structures and of passive directors are to be found in many VCTs (Venture Capital Trusts). ShareSoc and its members campaign to try to rein in the worst offenders, see https://www.sharesoc.org/campaigns/vct-investors-group/ Our principal objectives are: To provide best practice guidelines on management fees, performance fees, directors’ tenure and independence. To provide advice for investors on specific VCTs by Identifying existing holders willing to work with others to share knowledge, to identify areas of concern and to make ...