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Autonomy, FRC Meeting, Retailers and Brexit Legal Advice

The big news last Friday (30/11/2018) was that former CEO Mike Lynch has been charged with fraud in the USA over the accounts of Autonomy. That company was purchased by Hewlett Packard who promptly proceeded to write off most of the cost – see this blog post for more information: https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/regulations-and-law/belated-action-by-frc-re-autonomy/. As this was a UK company, are we anywhere nearer a hearing in the UK over the alleged “creative accounting” that took place at the company and the failure of the ...

FRC Investor Event on 3rd December 2018

This was a very well attended, very successful event held at the FRC office at 125 London Wall. An attentive audience of over 70 UKSA and ShareSoc members listened to senior members of the FRC team: Tracy Vegro (below), Jen Sisson, Carol Page, Andrew Meek, James Ferris, David Johnson, Claudia Mortimer, Catherine Horton, Marian Williams, Phil Fitzgerald and Deepa Raval. The FRC and the audit profession are being pilloried and heavily criticised. So, this was a chance for the FRC to explain what ...

EMIS Investor Event

On Thursday (29/11/2018) I attended the EMIS Group (EMIS) Capital Markets Day at the London Stock Exchange. Having held shares in the company since 2011, this was a great opportunity to get an update on the situation of the company and its future plans. First some background. EMIS is best known as the provider of software that general practitioners use – EMIS Web (primary care). That has more than 50% of the UK GP market. But the company also has many other ...

AJ Bell and FinnCap IPOs

Here are some comments on the IPOs of AJ Bell and FinnCap which are open to private investors ̶ the former to any of their clients who wish to put in £1,000 or more. The latter can be purchased from the PrimaryBid platform. Bearing in mind that I have previously said that you should never invest in IPOs (see my comment on Aston Martin which was certainly right as the shares are now down over 20% since IPO here: https://www.sharesoc.org/blog/company-news/the-market-dunedin-and-standard-life-smaller-companies-merger-and-aston-martin-ipo/ ), these ...

British Smaller Companies VCT Offer

It’s that time of year when share subscription offers for Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) tend to be launched. One of the first is that for the British Smaller Companies VCT (BSV). This one that has shown a relatively good performance for a generalist VCT – share price total return of 225 over ten years according to the AIC compared with a sector performance of 136. It also has a high dividend yield and a narrow discount to NAV. However I have ...