Saturday 19 April 2008

iWebsharedealing

I set up iwebsharedealing.blogspot.com with the intent of discussing the service (good and bad), provided by iwebsharedealing. I have an account there myself, and now they'd started offering PEPs, I'd been considering switching, but waiting for a good offer.

In the meantime, Google have blocked the blog iwebsharedealing as a potential spam blog. oh well. can only see what they hit upon in the end....

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Freedom 4 Tender Offer Messed Up?

The last ailing moments of probably my most disastrous investment ever, Pipex Communications, aka Freedom4 Communications, has not yet ended.

Recently, the company announced a "return of cash to shareholders" by way of special tender for up to 58% of your holding. Sounds simple enough, although really it was a special dividend, since the value of the remaining shares, holding only the Freedom4 joint Wimax venture with Intel and a 3.6 spectrum licence, has been disregarded by the stock market as worthless.

Anyhow, I'm with Halifax and Selftrade on this one, and Halifax got the notification out at least a week earlier than Selftrade. First issue is that many of Selftrade nominee holders are angry at this short deadline of only 2 days to get their reply in, which meant they missed it and have hence seen an 80% drop in the value of their investment!

I'm not impressed either, even though I did get my instructions in, since in my reply I deliberately stated that I wanted to tender ALL, in the event of other holders not taking up the option, yet they have only taken 58% of my holding offline. Ironically, if I had managed to tender the lot at 10p, it'd have been a decent profit, despite the rubbish performance of this one.I used to be impressed with Selftrade, but their offering is falling way behind iweb, especially for ISAs.

Secondly, we come to the Halifax, where my instructions were in well before the date. As of today, mine and many others have seen their entire holdings reappear in their Halifax account, with a huge red mark indicating the whopping 80% loss.

I don't know if this is just an administrative mistake, but I hate to think they "forgot" to tender my instructions.....I await to see if my money appears. These administrative errors could prove to be expensive.......