British Smaller Companies VCT

VCT Investor Workshop Report

The views expressed in this article are those of its author and not necessarily those of ShareSoc. Today (1st December) I attended a VCT Investor Workshop on-line run by the British Smaller Companies VCTs (BSV and BSC). These are two of the better performing generalist VCTs managed by YFM. It was a disappointing event. There were presentations from investee companies Unbiased and SharpCloud which gave a general overview of the businesses but no financial information – such as sales, profits and what the ...

British Smaller Companies VCT AGM 2020

I “attended” the British Smaller Companies VCT Annual General Meeting today via Zoom. This was yet another variant on the practice of virtual AGMs. But there were apparently about 30 people connected which is more than they normally get of shareholders at their AGMs. It was well managed with no significant technical problems, unlike others recently I have attended. Shareholders could vote for or against the resolutions on the day by using a Zoom Vote facility to give an instant poll result ...

Enormous Management Fees at British Smaller Companies VCT

British Smaller Companies VCT (BSV) has been one of the more successful Venture Capital Trusts in terms of fund performance – it is managed by YFM. The NAV Total Return has been 106.9 over the last ten years according to the AIC (i.e. investors have doubled their money), beating the sector performance for generalist VCTs of only 64. With high, tax-free dividends being paid, investors have probably been happy. But back in 2009 the managers performance incentive fee was changed to be ...

Undisclosed Fees and AGMs

It's interesting what you can learn at Annual General Meetings, or from ShareSoc reports on them, even if you don't attend in person. One of the recent news items in the financial press was about the disclosure of what private equity fund managers have received in "carried interest". It transpired that two very large US pension funds, Calpers and Calstrs, had no idea how much their fund managers had earned in this way over many years on top of their normal fees. ...

How to turn 9.5% into 2.4% – British Smaller Companies VCT

British Smaller Companies VCT (BSV) have recently circulated their Annual Report  prior to the AGM on the 29th July. They had a good year according to the Chairman's report with the value of the investment portfolio increasing by 9.5% over the year.  But the total return (net asset value plus dividends increased by only 2.4% (a rise of 4.8p to 197.5p since launch). How can that be? The reason is simply that costs went up 56%. That includes investment advisors fees up ...

Whitewash at British Smaller Companies VCT

British Smaller Companies VCT has called a General Meeting to approve resolutions to rectify past accounting errors that resulted in technically illegal payments of dividends and share buy-backs back in 2006-2008. In essence the company did not have the reserves required. So these "whitewash" resolutions as they are called ask shareholders to waive any claims against the directors for these errors, and claims against shareholders who received the dividends when they should not have. This follows similar whitewash resolutions that were ...