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Telegraph, 23 Feb 2021, How to use your broker to hold your investments to account

The Telegraph wrote a useful article about AGMs and voting. see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/investing/shares/use-broker-hold-investments-account/ It was headed How to use your broker to hold your investments to account But the real story was in the byline - Stockbrokers require investors to jump through lots of hoops to register their vote. It also explained the problems and quoted ShareSoc: However, new investors might not know that owning company shares comes with part ownership of a company – and with it the right to vote on issues at their annual ...

Scottish Investment Trust Review

One of my contacts has asked me to look at the Scottish Investment Trust (SCIN). This is a self-managed global investment trust which seems to have the same problems that Alliance Trust had before they had a revolution. Namely persistent under-performance. As a result, it is trading at a discount of 10.4% to the net asset value despite doing considerable share buy-backs in the last few months, presumably to try and control the discount. But as we saw at Alliance Trust, ...

Woodford says “I’m sorry” – I don’t accept apology. WoodfordPayBack time is here.

The Sunday Telegraph has run a puff piece of PR for Neil Woodford in which he says, “I am sorry”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/02/13/exclusive-neil-woodford-launch-comeback-fund-says-sorry-did/ Well, I am sorry too. I don’t accept Neil Woodford’s apology. WoodfordPayBack time is here. Woodford says that Link were wrong to close his fund, which led to a fire sale of many of his investments. I do at least agree with him on this. It is a scandal that events occurred so that shares in illiquid assets had to be sold at ...

The Courage to Act, or Not

Some of us have plenty of time to read good books while under lockdown rules. Here’s one I have been reading. It’s a memoir by Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve under the title “The Courage to Act”. It covers the major worldwide financial crisis of 2007/8 created by the defaults in sub-prime mortgages. The book includes a very good section on how that came about and how packaging up such mortgages eventually led to a complete lack of ...

Wellesley Investors Action Group

By Cliff Weight, Director, ShareSoc I encourage members to join the Wellesley Investors Action Group. You can do so here https://www.facebook.com/groups/wellesleyp2pcreditorsactiongroup Neil Taylor has brought this to my attention. ShareSoc is very willing to blog and tweet about this and encourage all those who have lost money in Wellesley to consider joining the Wellesley Investors Action Group. They have 300 members already which is a good start. But there were 11,700 investors affected, so ideally all should join the Action Group. The  336 ...