Woodford Patient Capital Share Discussion Threads

[porsche1945] 21/10/2019 10:00

That will be the Peter Lansdowne hiding tax free down in Guernsey who also happens to own ten per cent of Guernsey stock exchange where the woodford listings went, HL will be investigated over all this to a much greater degree than people think.

[madengland_] 21/10/2019 09:47

Had to chuckle seeing Peter Lansdowne sticking the boot into Neil Woodford in the press.....

[fxprotrader] 21/10/2019 09:25

I cant see any legal claim being upheld by any court. Otherwise every one with a financial advisor or stockbroker could be sued f they ever had a fund/stock that went down

[jonwig] 21/10/2019 09:03

That story could take up the whole half hour, not much space for NW! I don't think he's ever been accused of front-running. Not so easy with an unquoted start-up, of course!

[1oughton] 21/10/2019 08:50

Root out these crooked greedy managers.Hopefully he will see the inside of a court room soon. What drives these people to rake in even more money ?

[spectoacc] 21/10/2019 08:46

Interesting!

"Leaked documents show the Morebath fund had invested in a medical research company called Mesoblast, an Indian film company called Eros International and a gold mining company called Hummingbird Resources."

Anyone who follows Eros will know that he may not have much to retire on :))

[andy] 21/10/2019 08:41

An early casualty of tonight's Panorama!

[spectoacc] 21/10/2019 07:20

"Low cost platform but for some achieved at high cost" - spot on.

I'm largely with @topvest, but struggle to square "HL do not give investment advice" with their Wealth50 & other promotional literature. Remember they made c.£50m from shovelling clients into Woody's funds, whilst in some cases selling out of them in their in-house funds.

[jonwig] 21/10/2019 07:17

RUTH announcement. WIM's holding has fallen from 49.28% to 29.78% due to transfer from WIM to the new manager. (BlackRock probably, but we'll know soon.) So the situation looks like:

WPCT ..... 29.78%
WEIF ..... 19.50%

and the two are now independent of one another. I'd guess WEIF will dump its holding causing another lurch down in WPCT's nav.

Incidentally, Woodford may have 'closed down' WIM but it's status is still 'active' according to Companies House.

[jonwig] 20/10/2019 16:19

FT:

A UK law firm is investigating a potential legal claim against Hargreaves Lansdown on behalf of angry investors who stand to lose money as a result of the demise of Woodford Investment Management.

Leigh Day, a specialist in group compensation cases, said it was assessing legal recourse for losses as a result of Hargreaves’ support for Britain’s best-known stock picker Neil Woodford after being approached by investors.

Hargreaves has long been the UK’s most popular online broker but was dragged into the downfall of the celebrity fund manager for continuing to back him in its “best buy” list and own-brand funds despite increasing concerns over his investments.

Kam Vojdani, a class-action solicitor at Leigh Day, said he was investigating potential action on whether Hargreaves should have removed Woodford funds from its Wealth 50 list, or “best buy” list, of favourite funds earlier than it did.

In June, Hargreaves revealed it had been locked in talks with Mr Woodford over the poor liquidity of his funds since 2017, but had admitted Woodford Equity Income to its Wealth 50 list in January, prompting more customer money to flow into it.

Any legal claim would likely hinge on whether it could be established that Hargreaves had given bad investment advice. This would mean proving that its marketing of its Wealth 50 list constituted a form of advice.

Hargreaves’ customers for the most part choose their own investments, but many turned to the Wealth 50 list, marketed by the company as “what we believe to be the best funds across all the major sectors for new investment”.

Mr Vojdani said he was also investigating whether Hargreaves and Woodford became too closely interlinked and could be said to have been dependent on one another. No claim has been filed so far.

Andrew Russell, a 62-year-old Hargreaves customer whose investments have shed £23,000 so far across all of Woodford’s funds, said he would consider joining a legal claim.

“It’s left a bitter taste in the mouth, particularly when you read about Neil Woodford in his second homes and Mark Dampier [research director at Hargreaves] and his wife selling Hargreaves Lansdown shares weeks before the Woodford fund was suspended,” he said.

“Someone must have known this was about to happen and it’s people who’ve been saving all their lives and doing the right thing who are ending up picking up the bill.”

Hargreaves Lansdown said in a statement: “As with all HL plc share sales made by directors, trades were approved ahead of the transaction and there is a clear public record. The timing of these share sales and the gating of WEIF was entirely coincidental.”

Neil, a 44-year-old Hargreaves customer whose initial £23,000 investment in Woodford funds has fallen to about £8,000, said he was “interested in knowing my options with regards to a legal claim”. He said he would be calling on the Financial Conduct Authority and his MP to push for regulatory changes.

[cpap man] 20/10/2019 15:17

Joanne Hart - MIDAS - DAILY MAIL - Ref: Woodford & REDD

[pugugly] 20/10/2019 14:03

re 10966-Topvest - Most PI's are not seasoned investors like yourself - They therefore tended to believe HL - Quote "Herbert 64 from London said " I invested mainly because Hargreaves Lansdown was promoting it so much and hailing Woodford as a star investor" as quoted in the Daily Mail

As HL was perceived an authorative source by the General Public they have (imo) significant responsibility in this situastion subject of course to timing of their recommendations - Flogging a dead horse comes to mind!! or maybe Terry Smith's explanation has more truth!!

[porsche1945] 20/10/2019 13:25

@simon, good post.
Brexit is destroying the uk, aprotest vote by many with little to lose, Cameron an imbecile to call a referendum after 8 years of “ austerity “. The britsih are self harming rather than pragmatic by nature, they seem to identify with hardship. Trashed currency, flatlining economy, poor productivity, a dreadful north south divide, in fact i would say London rest of country divide. Bunter is a product of a weak tory party really led by dregs for some time, an unelectable back to the seventies opposition, its all pretty dire. Maybe a half decent deal, May’s was better that Johnsons, or it gets revoked. No sensible countries have referendums, it will be Scotland again next. Just a total sxxtshow.

[ltinvestor] 20/10/2019 12:48

One bio stock that Woodford invested in is achieving all its targets.Woodfords stake in one of his funds was taken out a couple of months ago by Petre Kellner who is ranked 88 th in the billionaires list with $15.5bn.Wpct still have a fairly large holding in Autolus which I presume will also be taken out in due course.The Woodford Effect has had a negative impact on the share price and the CEO of Autolus recently referred to a major disconnect between the share price and the progress being made.Autolus is fully funded till mid 2021...

[elmfield] 20/10/2019 11:22

Yes, I found myself agreeing to some of what Simon wrote until
that last post,
The old Simon burst out, just can’t help himself,😂

[jonwig] 20/10/2019 11:13

Simongordon -

Not very apposite: you're dying to write about Johnson (which you can and no doubt have done on other threads) so tag the Woodford name as an excuse.

I do hope that you haven't set up the kind of irrelevant argument here which is better conducted elsewhere.

[simon gordon] 20/10/2019 10:34

It's fascinating how Woodford and Johnson are brothers in arms.

It's the zeitgeist!

Nick Cohen - 20/10/19

Have you heard of the catastrophic men theory of history? Step forward Boris Johnson...

Self-interested and reckless leadership defines too much of our past – and present

Boris Johnson concludes his Churchill biography with splutters against historians who insist the “story of humanity is not the story of great men and shining deeds”. The story of Winston Churchill, he cries, “is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He and he alone made the difference.”

The story of Boris Johnson withers too. He is shrivelling Britain: making it cramped, poor and irrelevant. Modern historians may sniff at the 19th-century notion that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men” to use Thomas Carlyle’s words. The rest of us should not be so complacent and register the capacity of catastrophic men and women to change the world for the worse.

In his classic study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon analysed British generals who had led their men to pointless deaths from Crimea to Arnhem. How familiar his diagnosis feels. Dixon identified “overweening ambition dedicated to one goal – self-advancementR21; as a persistent fault; and that sounds familiar. Catastrophic men equated “war with sport”, he continued, and one thinks of Theresa May’s warning in 2016 that “politics isn’t a game.”

She surely had Johnson in mind. For him, it is a game and winning is all. Last year, he told the Democratic Unionist party that a border in the Irish Sea “would be damaging to the fabric of the union”. He jutted out what passes for his jaw and with a Churchillian boom thundered: “I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

Last week, he signed up to “such an arrangement” because betraying his allies wins him the game of politics. Dixon noticed “an underestimation, sometimes bordering on the arrogant, of the enemy”. And one thinks of Dominic Cummings, so lost in his deluded machismo that he told EU countries that they “will go to the bottom of the queue” if they dared challenge the mighty Britain. A mere fortnight later, Johnson capitulated to Brussels so thoroughly the EU will no longer has to worry about the Irish border and can adopt the toughest of stances when and if trade negotiations begin.

No one should be surprised. It is an essential part of the catastrophic character that catastrophists do not learn from their mistakes or realise they are making them.

On the small matters as well as the large, political incompetents mirror military incompetents. Generals who display “a love of bull, smartness, precision and strict preservation of the military pecking order” are prone to lead regiments to disaster, Dixon wrote. Remember Jacob Rees-Mogg’s semi-literate instruction to his civil servants that they must address untitled men as “esq” when the practice is archaic. Or his insistence that they never use “hopefullyR21; in his presence: even though the adverb has stood in for “I hope” for centuries and no serious linguist has the smallest problem with it.

Hopefully, you can see the links between disastrous generals and politicians. Catastrophic business leaders share their characteristics. Since the crash, there has been an explosion of interest in how unstable men and women are overrepresented at the top of business. The Australian Psychological Society’s congress heard a study of 261 senior professionals in the US, which found 21% had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits compared to one in 100 in the general population. Once again, Johnsonian flippancy was in evidence. Psycho bosses treated business as “a game about getting where they want and having dominance over others”. Meanwhile, economists have demonstrated how overconfident managers fail to account for risks.

You might object that a democratic politician is different from Fred Goodwin at RBS or Adam Neumann at WeWork or a general who will not tolerate insubordination. They work in hierarchies, where it can be impossible for subordinates to criticise without risking their careers. By contrast, hundreds of thousands were on the streets of Britain yesterday making every criticism of Johnson imaginable – all of them correct.

For all that, Johnson remains in a bubble that feeds narcissistic delusions. The Tory press fawns over him because he is one of its own. His party toes the line because Johnson removes the whip from Tory MPs who challenge him and Cummings orders armed police officers to take away allegedly disloyal aides on the flimsiest of excuses.

Johnson’s career of failing upwards since he left Eton illustrates that overconfidence is class determined. In politics and so many other British institutions, you see mediocrities take jobs for which they are not remotely qualified, because wealthy families and a private education have emboldened them.

In all spheres, catastrophic men and women are united by an imperviousness to the suffering they cause. Even on the most optimistic assumptions, UK in a Changing Europe found Johnson’s “deal” will take £16bn from already dangerously underfunded public services and all who depend on them. (The pessimists believe £49bn will go.) The PM’s lack of concern for them is typical. Dixon described the siege of Kut in 1915 in what is now Iraq: an operation that led to 30,000 British and Indian army casualties. It distinguished itself, even in the First World War, for having no military purpose whatsoever.

When Maj Gen Charles Townshend surrendered, he was treated with the utmost courtesy by his Turkish opponents. They sent his 13,000 surviving men on a death march across the steppes that claimed 7,000 lives. Townshend’s concern “for the welfare of his dog was considerably more in evidence than for the welfare of his troops”.

Catastrophic men can determine the fate of armies, businesses and countries. Without fail, the catastrophes they bring are always someone else’s problem. I will grant Johnson this. There is every chance that history will say: “He and he alone made the difference.”

[my retirement fund] 20/10/2019 09:45

Seen it with Aviva managed funds in the 90s and Govett managed funds in the 80s. Its all history repeating itself. Only difference this time is theres a single name to blame rather than a name hiding behind a faceless corporation

[my retirement fund] 20/10/2019 09:41

Yes move on pal and learn, I've seen this all before with Standard life managed funds in the 00's. When you see a fund that consistently buys high and poorly and then to go to only to buy again and again lower and lower its pretty obvious you have a fund manager, his team and related parties detached from realities with lottery style salaries running un checked and out of control

[my retirement fund] 20/10/2019 09:35

I like you jonwig