Schroder Uk Public Private Share Discussion Threads

[jonwig] 12/7/2020 06:40

Telegraph, some recycled material here:

A class-action lawsuit by out-of-pocket investors against the supervisor of Neil Woodford’s collapsed flagship fund could be worth £160m.

Lawyers preparing a claim against Link Fund Solutions, the fund administrator, believe an award could bankrupt the company and force investors to rely on the Financial Services Compensation Scheme to get their money back, according to documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

Mr Woodford’s equity income fund was shut last year when the star stock picker was unable to sell assets quickly enough to meet withdrawal requests from customers, because his fund had a large number of investments that were hard to sell.

About 2,900 investors have approached Leigh Day, the law firm, about joining its legal action against Link, which was supposed to ensure their money was protected.

Leigh Day believes it can represent about 40,000 investors, bringing its total claim to a possible £160m. The figure assumes an average initial investment of £8,155 and that investors have lost about half of their money, according to pitch documents seeking financial backing for the claim.

Bozena Michalowska Howells, partner at Leigh Day, said: “Damages will depend entirely on individual cases ... We believe investors could receive more than this amount.”

A claim of that size could overwhelm Link, whose annual accounts show pre-tax profits of £7.7m. “There is [a] risk that Link may default on an award of damages,” Leigh Day lawyers wrote.

The lawyers expect investors could turn to the FSCS for claims of up to £85,000 per person as they are unlikely to have recourse to Link’s Australian parent company.

Leigh Day is also weighing up a claim against Hargreaves Lansdown. The funds platform should have excluded the Woodford fund from its best buy list after 2016 due to the number of red flags over the fund’s liquidity, a report commissioned by Leigh Day from consultancy Fideres concluded.

Link and Hargreaves Lansdown declined to comment.

[daffyjones] 11/7/2020 19:01

He's back!

Woodford stages comeback with biotech role at wealth manager Juno


Neil Woodford is staging his comeback as an adviser to a backer of start-up companies.

Sky News has learnt that Woodford has quietly begun working for Juno Capital, whose partners include the FTSE-100 grandee Sir Nigel Rudd, who has run and chaired a string of major British industrial groups.

City sources said that Mr Woodford and Craig Newman, who helped run Woodford Investment Management before its spectacular implosion, were working with Juno to build a portfolio of unquoted healthcare investments.

[spectoacc] 09/7/2020 15:15

4th & 5th paras from end caught my eye:

"...For workplace defined contribution saving that facilitates a long-term investing horizon and encourages this pool of savers to participate in the compounding of their savings from sustainable and patient equity investing."

(Next para even worse - hasn't he heard of VCTs?).


Couldn't be much more book-talking. Basically - we want workplace pension money, invested long-term, so we don't need to worry about performance too much and can compound the fees.

Why seek to launch a new IT if they've already got a couple of kids running the former In-patient Capital? How's the compounding been going there?

Patience isn't the problem. Govnts rarely direct investment well (the regional nature of the precursor to iii possibly an exception). Personally been surprised how readily co's have raised cash during Covid, with only one or two exceptions (and would you really want to chuck more equity at eg INTU?). The likes of RTN, CINE etc, arguable basket-cases but no problem raising cash.

[rambutan2] 09/7/2020 15:08

From a piece in investment wk today by Schroder's boss. The relevant comment in the 3rd para from last caught my attention!

...The full economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis is now beginning to be felt as each day brings fresh news of job losses. It will get worse.

So far, it's been surprisingly easy for companies to raise money with demand buoyed by a resurgence in stock markets. But if markets become less resilient or if a second wave of Covid-19 comes companies will struggle to raise additional funds in flat or falling markets.

There is a particular need to support companies in the small to mid-cap bracket. These firms are too large to be the focus of the government's initiatives, but are not "mega caps" able to wield their clout with banks or credit markets.

These small and mid-sized companies, with market caps in the £5m to £2bn range, comprise 69 of the 300 public equity placings seen so far. Through these, they've raised around £3.8bn. Our fear is that this could prove a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed.

For our part, our UK smaller companies investment team increasingly feels that it has insufficient funds to support all the rights issues that are required to protect quality UK companies. Across the industry, £150m has seeped out of small cap UK equity funds so far this year. Put simply, there isn't enough money to go around for this part of the market. And if you look at the detail, the money raised by companies isn't from fresh investment, it has been recycled from other UK equities or from existing fund cash balances. This obviously can't continue.

Bold action is needed now to bring new money into the market. That is why we have suggested the creation of a government patient capital fund. It would support businesses but also make the British public stakeholders in companies with the potential to thrive. Other countries have been very successful in building sovereign wealth funds; the UK has long needed a framework to help small companies scale up.

The fiscal statement aside now is the time for legislators and regulators to deal with other long-standing issues. We would like to see more flexible regulation for workplace defined contribution saving that facilitates a long-term investing horizon and encourages this pool of savers to participate in the compounding of their savings from sustainable and patient equity investing. This would support the pool of capital available to invest in growth in the UK.

In addition, investments designed for the very long-term require appropriate fund structures. Fund platforms must be instructed to allow non-daily dealing funds. Only then can an important pool of patient capital emerge from retirement savings. Prevarication on this issue has gone on too long.

Asset managers like ourselves have an important part to play too. We are currently assessing the launch of an investment trust which would provide fresh equity to both public and private markets. It would seek to identify the highest quality sustainable businesses that have strong growth opportunities ahead, if they can just survive the present.

Clearly, we have a responsibility to our clients in terms of investment returns. Our industry also has a responsibility to the country to help protect jobs and ensure that the companies that will drive future economic growth remain solvent.

Everybody has a part to play in this crisis. For our industry, its ensuring capital markets work when British companies - and their employees - need them most. Our investment trust would be only the start of what is needed. We ask the government, and our investment industry peers, to play their role in the great recapitalisation of companies.

Peter Harrison is group chief executive at Schroders

[johnwig] 02/7/2020 08:13

spectoacc's dastardly plan to infect the whole of Yorkshire seems to be working well. With adae to help him what can go wrong, although he/she has suddenly run out of things to say?

I wonder what rex t'dog thinks? He lives in the hottest spot in the UK.

[pete_bane] 01/7/2020 16:27

EE ba goom, there must be something reet wrong with SUPP. They’ve changed their address AND there company secretary. I predict that the share price will go down to 1p by the end of the week and will never recover. I’ve taken a loook at all the companies they own and there isn’t one that has any notional asspect value (NAV). The Stasi woman down at the supermarket confirmed that I was totally correct.

[harijan] 25/6/2020 23:06

I bet the two old gits are plaintively still claiming that they have filtered johnwig. Nobody believes them. Nobody ever has.

Net asset value:
Jonwig zilch
Spectoacc zilch

[chuckol] 25/6/2020 16:03

Great post by johnwig over on the Rutherford (RUTH) thread. LOL

[spectoacc] 25/6/2020 06:56

Enjoyed that, thanks @jonwig.

In Neil's defence, "No one ever seems to live there.." might be because it's his holiday home & lockdown. The large equestrian estate lies elsewhere of course.

But let's remember that this is the Neil Woodford who claimed to have needed to raise money for his tax bill last July, after quietly slotting the majority of his (then) WPCT stake. Is that the one good trade he made with WPCT?

Not so short of money if he can keep adding at Salcombe. Closing down WIM won't have been cheap either (lease liabilities, redundancies etc), and that came well after the WPCT dump.

[chucko1] 23/6/2020 19:33

I've not yet read the whole thing, but I did see the FX gain. Did they make any reference to any hedges that they had in place? I have not seen anything from them on that before, but then this is the first real update from Schroders, so that is not surprising.

Some fund managers do not hedge the FX as they see it as naturally hedged from the revenues of the investee companies, but that would typically be for large multinationals etc. It seems unlikely to me that there would have been no hedges in place, although you never know how much to hedge (owing to the volatility if the underlying asset). With Woodford making the initial risk management decisions, though, just about anything is/was possible.

As you will know, SQN hedged their USD investments, but have removed the hedge on account of liquidity concerns relating to posted collateral. They also made it clear that they had done so. These are very tricky decisions to take in volatile markets. Most often, boards elect to remove the entire hedge, as opposed to partially removing it. Madness - but they want to be able to show they made a well-though-through decision as though there is a right and wrong answer. There is not and so they ought not represent certainty! SUPP appear to have presented little on that score (or, to be fair, WPCT).

[scrapheap] 23/6/2020 17:27

Yep - that could unwind at any time of course!

[spectoacc] 23/6/2020 16:11

Agreed, & they not unreasonably mention Autolus's recovery.

Be interesting to see if Link marks down the stocks WEIF transferred to Acacia Research, tho the majority are at the smaller end (but not all, & represented c.£112m off the WEIF valuation).

The most interesting thing to me - and so far unremarked - was how much of a gain they made on the Forex translation.

[brianarthur1939] 23/6/2020 15:38

It's only a week until the next day of reckoning,. I'm pretty sure we'll see a rise after the March figures.

I do think it's a long wait from now to the tail end of the next quarter. Surely they can do better than that? Or is there some reason which I don't know about which prevents them reporting sooner?

[scrapheap] 23/6/2020 14:56

Autolus was responsible for much of the quoted write-down as at 31st March. It closed at $5.99 that day.

It's trading at $15.46 today. On 31st December it was $13.20.

So some good news to come for the SUPP NAV then presumably there?

[1tcm1] 22/6/2020 16:00

Perspicacious readers will note that the version of the report on the NAV to March 31 posted by SpectoAcc on the corrupt thread has been heavily edited and redacted presumably by SpectoAcc (or perhaps jonwig). Perspicacious readers will know that it is highly inadvisable to rely on such a doctored document. Better to do as Harijan sensibly suggests and press the link posted above under News entitled:

"Schroder UK Public Private Tst plc Net Asset Value(s)"

[spectoacc] 22/6/2020 13:14

And in other, less thread-clogging news - Acacia Research continuing to flog the listed giveaways, eg DDDD, to enable them to actually pay WEIF.

[1tcm1] 19/6/2020 01:03

We’ve all noted that the highest current uk increase in Coronavirus is in Yorkshire closely followed by Deeside. Why am I not surprised at that?

Does spectoacc ride a bike, I wonder.

[chucko1] 18/6/2020 23:38

So, if Link can preside over this degree of ineptitude, image the talent they brought to bear in the matter of valuing the portfolio when it had the Woodford name on it. There's nothing that is beyond possible. Oh, and the FCA? For them, a problem that does not fit neatly into a pigeon-hole simply is not a problem. Or at least until there is a pattern of them, which allows the unscrupulous to dance well into the night.

[harijan] 18/6/2020 09:43

Spectoacc, our malevolent little fool, is getting ever more desperate. Nonsense hit-rate all over ADVFN is increasing daily. Seems, however, that nobody is really taking any notice of him. I would guess that most have really truly filtered him.

He hasn't washed his hands since lockdown started so that he can infect more people. Trouble is no self-respecting coronavirus would ever come near him.