CHARLES STANLEY GROUP PLC (CAY)

CHARLES STANLEY GROUP PLC (CAY)

Blog posts

Chas Stanley Prices Crest Membership At Ridiculous Level

Charles Stanley have sent out a letter to all their customers who use Personal Crest accounts that in future they will be charged £504 per annum (inc. VAT). Although the company stopped offering the service to new customers some time ago, existing users have in some cases been paying nothing to be a Personal Crest member. They clearly want to get rid of all such users of their service, include those using the low-cost Chas Stanley Direct platform because £504 is ...

Offer for Share Centre Canned and Changes at Charles Stanley

Interactive Investor Services have announced they do not intend to make an offer for the Share Centre (Share Plc – SHRE) as previously mooted. That’s probably a relief for users of that platform. But users of the Charles Stanley (CAY) broking services may have concerns as the company announced this morning that they are going to simplify and standardise their service to cut costs and improve the service to clients. Some staff will be cut but the impact on customers is not ...

Charles Stanley Direct Raise Charges

Charles Stanley Direct, one of the more popular execution only on-line trading platforms for retail investors, have announced they are revising their charges. This follows on from a similar announcement by AJ Bell Youinvest a few weeks ago. For share dealing, the transaction charge will rise from £10 to £11.50. In addition there will be a "platform" charge of 0.25% per annum on the value of the portfolio holdings, charged monthly although these will be capped at £240 per annum. In addition, ...

Charles Stanley Halts Certificated Dealing

Charles Stanley, one of the larger traditional retail stockbrokers, has advised its clients that it will soon cease support of certificated trading. Those retaining paper share certificates because they appreciate the rights associated with being on the share register of a company will be moved into nominee accounts, unless they choose to transfer their business elsewhere. We have updated the page on the ShareSoc web site which lists alternative suppliers of certificated dealing and personal crest accounts which is here: brokers One advantage ...

Bargains You Could Not Pick Up

As I predicted might happen in an earlier blog this morning, there was a panic when the market opened as the pound was already down substantially. But if you tried to pick up some bargains, it was damn difficult. Retail service providers who provide electronic quotes to brokers seemed to stop providing them, and just logging into some retail platforms proved very difficult. Even if you managed to log in, the service was so slow that it was impossible to do ...

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. ...

Charles Stanley and Alliance Trust

Stockbroker Charles Stanley (CAY) today announced their Preliminary Results for the year ending in March, and also announced they had exchanged contracts for the disposal of the CSS Division. The results were somewhat better than expected, but there was a loss before tax of £6.1 million, albeit with positive underlying earnings per share. Charles Stanley have a considerable retail investor client base and it is always worthwhile for investors to keep an eye on the financial position of their stockbroker. The ...

Charles Stanley loses Finance Director

Charles Stanley announced yesterday (9/1/2014) that its Finance Director James Rawlingson was "leaving with immediate effect".  This follows the appointment of a new CEO in December after the publication of a dire set of half year results at the end of November. Funds under management were static and revenue from the Financial Services Division and platform Charles Stanley Direct were up substantially but higher costs resulted in a loss before tax of £3.9 million. The dividend was maintained at the half ...

Cyber threats and how to avoid them

The International Organisation of Securities Commissions (Iosco) has warned about the growing threats of cyber attacks to financial institutions. The Chairman, Greg Medcraft, has warned that there needs to be a much more concerted effort to tackle such threats. For example disruption of a stock exchange for any length of time could have serious consequences. Securities regulators who are members of Iosco are seeing increased attacks with more than half of securities exchanges being the subject of one or more. The closure ...

AGM Reports

Charles Stanley Takeover  Meetings 

I attended, via the LumiAGM platform, the Court Meeting and General Meeting of Charles Stanley Group (CAY) to approve the takeover by Raymond James this morning. In other words, these were hybrid meetings with both physical attendees and web attendees. The meetings were reasonably well run but there were no questions from attendees and I guess it will go through as the offer price is more than 40% higher than the previous closing price for CAY shares. But we will have to ...

Charles Stanley (CAY) AGM Report 2015

Charles Stanley Group Plc (CAY) are a long-established stockbroker. Their recent results have been poor and they had to do a share placing to strengthen their capital position a few weeks ago. They also disposed of one division recently, perhaps for the same reason. There were about 50 shareholders present (more than I expected) at their offices in the City of London for the meeting. The Chairman is Sir David Howard who was previously Executive Chairman, but is now non-exec. His family ...