Halifax shares help

jblakes

Evening Gents

I forgot i had a silly £500 bet if you like back in 2011, i brought 28,968 shares at 1.68p, i forgot about these till now.

I checked tonight and i have now only got 1448 shares, something called corporate action happened in july 2017, thats when these changes happen.

So the price today is 3.68p, so which the original share i brought, it should be worth just over 1k, but its actually worth (1448 x 3.68) =53 ish pound.

Can somebody tell me how, why, and if they can do that?

kind regards
James

Tom99

Which companys shares did you buy and are you sure the current price is not £3.68?

PeacefulWaters

Halifax/HBOS/LBG shares have never traded at those levels.

So which company is it?

Regardless, you've probably gone through a corporate action where every twenty shares has been replaced by a single share worth, at the time, twenty times the value of the old share. Alas, this has subsequently coincided with the overall value of the company plummeting.

redux

Sometimes companies with rising values split their shares and issue 2 to 5 or 10 new ones for each old one, with a corresponding change in price.

This appears to be the reverse, like a consolidation

28968 / 20 = 1448.4

Morphoton

The link below is to a 2-page PDF which details the full share history of the Halifax including rights issues and corporate changes.
Halifax was taken over by Bank of Scotland and became HBOS in Sep 2001.
HBOS was taken over by Lloyds in Jan 2009.
You would have been unable to buy Halifax shares in 2011.
Link:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/globalassets/documents/investors/2016/lbg_share_history_22dec2016.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwiumM3k3srYAhWFmbQKHesrATwQFgg1MAM&usg=AOvVaw0oFpfkQAFc4NzI7zYJvRyZ

jblakes

sorry, i shouldnt have put halifax shares as title. It was through there shares account. Company was solo oil, brought back in 2012 at 1.68, then dropped to around 0.25 lol. The corporate action was july17 shares still around 0.25, then jumped to 3.5ish.

Is this normal? i thought i buy a share and its mine forever to do what i want with it?

regards
James

Tom99

The shares tripled in price in early 2011 so you must have bought at almost the highest point and they have since fallen in value by 90% hence your £500 is now worth £50.

jblakes

yes but what i dont understand is i brought them at 1.68p and now they are 3.8ish p, so should have gone up not down?

eskbanker

jblakes wrote: »

sorry, i shouldnt have put halifax shares as title. It was through there shares account. Company was solo oil, brought back in 2012 at 1.68, then dropped to around 0.25 lol. The corporate action was july17 shares still around 0.25, then jumped to 3.5ish.

Is this normal? i thought i buy a share and its mine forever to do what i want with it?

regards
James

The July 2017 consolidation meant that for every 20 shares you held on 24 July @ 0.24p were exchanged for one replacement share valued at 5.38p on 25 July (figures from http://www.solooil.co.uk/investors/share-price-centre.aspx).

So the corporate action itself actually increased the total value of your holding versus the day before, but you'd already lost 85% before then, and since then it's dropped a bit more.

Companies are quite entitled to undertake such actions, which do indeed change the volumes (and values) of shares held by investors, which is why as a shareholder you'd have been notified of the AGM resolution to implement this, and could have attended and voted against if you felt strongly (wouldn't have changed the result though!).

jblakes

thats a load of poo then, so a company can screw ppl then? If they swap all the shares from what ppl have for whatever the price is, then next day they triple, they have won and cost ppl money.

jimjames

jblakes wrote: »

thats a load of poo then, so a company can screw ppl then? If they swap all the shares from what ppl have for whatever the price is, then next day they triple, they have won and cost ppl money.

No they don't. Read the explanation again. I'd really recommend learning a bit more about shares and the risks involved before you start trading like that to avoid losing money. On the plus side at least your "silly bet" was only £500