Share mid price for probate valuation. Online?

brookhouse

Share registrar want £18 per holding to tell me the share price for probate valuation.

Is this information online for free somewhere?

Keep_pedalling

If you look up each of the companies on Yahoo Finace you will see a link to historic share price on the let hand column.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com

brookhouse

Yes, they have opening, closing, day high and day low, but there is a specific price that is needed for the probate valuation, which a daily mid price.

Where do I find that?

alanq

The mid-market price is half way between the buying and selling prices at a given time. The closing price on financial information sites is the mid-market price at a specified time. I suspect that closing price will be good enough.

"You can value shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange by finding the price of the shares in the financial pages of a newspaper"
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/373508/IHT400_Notes.pdf

Failing that:

For prices of LSE listed shares since 1999.

"The DOL is a daily publication of official quotations for all securities traded on the London Stock Exchange. The DOL price is presented in a bid and ask format and is widely used in a variety of calculations including pension portfolio valuations and for probate, as recommended by HM Revenue and Customs."

"The Historic Price Service
The Historic Price Service (HPS) provides online access to request individual DOL quotations for all securities traded on the London Stock Exchange, dating back to 1999." Costs £5 + VAT per quotation.
http://www.londonstockexchange.com/products-and-services/reference-data/hps/hps.htm

IanManc

alanq wrote: »

The mid-market price is half way between the buying and selling prices at a given time. The closing price on financial information sites is the mid-market price at a specified time. I suspect that closing price will be good enough.

I agree with this. There's no point in paying someone to give you a valuation, when you can look it up yourself. A paid-for valuation is no more accurate or authoritative, and carries no more weight, than one you can find out yourself for nothing.

Owain_Moneysaver

The serious daily newspapers have daily share listings for the most popular shares (or those where the company pays to have its share price included in the listings) and your local library may have archives of the newspapers.

NB you will need the paper for the day after, as they publish closing prices for the preceding day.

brookhouse

Sure I can find the closing prices online or in the papers.

I am concerned about getting the right mid-price that the HMRC want me to use.

The holdings are large so a few pence difference in price per share is significant.

bowlhead99

brookhouse wrote: »

Sure I can find the closing prices online or in the papers.

I am concerned about getting the right mid-price that the HMRC want me to use.

The holdings are large so a few pence difference in price per share is significant.

HMRC's guidance is that you don't need to use a professional valuation service and can take the price from a published source such as a newspaper- for example whatever it said in the next morning's FT. You can see that on their iht400 guidance notes, pg 67:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/373508/IHT400_Notes.pdf

However, if closing price reported in the paper is just the closing mid-price (half way btw bid and offer), or last dealt price, this "lazy way" of getting your valuation may result in you getting a higher value than you would be allowed to get away with, which if the holdings are large as you suggest, might be significant.

If you go to the next page of the guidance on how to do the valuation (p68), it says that if you got a third party valuation service to give you your figures you would have got two prices, rather than just "the price" from the newspaper or website. The official way to convert that to an inheritance tax value is not to take the middle of the two prices but to use the "quarter up" method. So basically you get a price that is towards the lower end (reflecting the fact you would be selling assets from the estate rather than buying) but not the absolute low point. If the price spread is 1000p-1020p, the quarter up price is 1000+a quarter of the spread, I.e. 1005p

This quarter-up method accounts for the fact that real transactions in listed shares are done on a market over the course of a day and typical transactions are available within the published spread. If you have a daily priced unit trust which is in the paper with two prices, in that case you just use the lowest of the two.

So, if you are looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of stocks with wide spreads, you might be able to use lower prices, by using a proper and officially sanctioned valuation method. If 40% of the valuation difference is being given away in taxes, I'd advise against cutting corners to grab the easy single price just because HMRC is willing to let you do that. It may well be worth more than £18 or whatever, on some holdings.

If you are well below the IHT threshold, or you're dealing with some AIM shares which might not be IHT-able anyway, then it's probably not worth the extra hassle of getting scientific and following HMRC rules to the letter, you can just use the shortcut.