SVS Securities - shut down?

manorhouse

I agree with both of the last two posts , lets have both.
I'm not young and slow with tec so maybe someone else might find that simpler to set up. 
Now the one i had in mind when i first learned of SVS agro  was interactive broker as i will have much more then the limit they charge for holding stock .
( well i did then lol )
As you know i was always confident we would lose nothing but the inconvenience of lock in .
( Have the woodford lot been unlocked yet ? )
Thank God i did not open before the switch over as i would of been paying fees for last eight months .
I do not like waste as might be evident.
I hope some might give the cons of IB as some did for Degiro i am greatfull for that.

masonic

johnburman said:

Trading 212 has no commisison and no inactivity fees; Degiro is cheap (but overseas with stock lending)) and Fineco are new to me, but cheap and are an Italian bank. All useful stuff I would have thought for SVS clients? 

I agree, but questions have been asked about these brokers and what might happen in practice if they were to fail too. I think they are valid questions and worth pursuing, but there is little point in doing so if you don't ask anyone you haven't asked already.

manorhouse

I came across this post from a customer of Hargreaves Lansdown in which he complained about them . On London south east ( a chat site which all experienced  users here would be aware of or heard about )

Customer experiences that is one of the things i am looking for.

( not sure as i read a lot but might of been BRD )

poniexpress

Posts: 389

Price: 91.00

No Opinion

Market Abuse20 Feb '20

This share is one of the AIM most abused shares. Take for instance todays trade at 15.42.12 showing as a sell of 632 shares at trade price 87.00 for a total of £549.84. It was my buy actioned on Hargreaves Lansdown (Contract note available). At the time the bid was 86.00p, the ask 90.00p so the deal price of 87p could not have been mistaken as a sell. (well below mid point).
I would suggest that many other trades on the Nex exchange for this share are the same for the last 4-5 days. Relative heavy buying but share price dropping. The share price is being badly manipulated either by MMs or others including directors of the company.

Thrugelmir

What's the complaint against HL? HL will simply transact the placed order through the market. AIM shares are generally thinly traded/illiquid in the market place. 

masonic

From my limited browsing of the LSE.co.uk forum, a lot of the discussion there is around people feeling aggrieved about the algorithms used to predict whether an order was a "buy" or a "sell" using the deal price as a guide. I'm sure Hargreaves Lansdown plays no part in determining what pops up on websites such as that one.

johnburman

SVS NEWS to-day 21 April 2020 from the LC website:

UPDATE 21/04/2020: The Creditors’ Committee has approved the Distribution Plan. Further details to be published shortly.

bowlhead99

manorhouse said:

This share is one of the AIM most abused shares. Take for instance todays trade at 15.42.12 showing as a sell of 632 shares at trade price 87.00 for a total of £549.84. It was my buy actioned on Hargreaves Lansdown (Contract note available). At the time the bid was 86.00p, the ask 90.00p so the deal price of 87p could not have been mistaken as a sell. (well below mid point).

I would suggest that many other trades on the Nex exchange for this share are the same for the last 4-5 days. Relative heavy buying but share price dropping. The share price is being badly manipulated either by MMs or others including directors of the company.

When you look at the list of trades which are published on the stock exchange website, the stock exchange can't tell you for a lot of them if they are buys or sells (a transaction in SETS will just be both a buy and a sell matched against each other), but in thinly traded stocks the market makers will buy from or sell to the investor's broker and separately clear down their books later to avoid being stuck long or short.    As you can infer from masonic's post, some data services receiving a feed of published trades from the stock exchange (whether AIM or NEX or elsewhere) will guesstimate whether they are more likely to be buys or sells from the ordering customer, based on whether the price is nearer to the bid or the ask price (offer price) and flag them up accordingly, and some investors will use that data to take a look through the daily volume and make assumptions about whether it means a lot of people are buying or selling.   

In the past, I have sometimes sold nearer to offer price than bid price, or bought nearer to bid than to the full offer price, depending on how big my order was and exactly how the orders are moving at the time, so the data services which predict buys and sells will not always be able to do it reliably, and will just use an algorithm to guess.

In the example you gave, the user poniexpress says that he made a small purchase for less than a thousand shares and less than a thousand pounds of value, which may well have been within the 'normal market size' for the exchange for that stock (normal market size changes from time to time using a formula based on historic volumes on the exchange). The bid and offer prices are based on an order of NMS and so should be the minimum you would get for selling and the maximum you would have to pay to buy an order of that size. At the time, poniexpress notes that the bid was 86 and offer 90 ; not clear if this was the actual live bid-offer spread at that moment which he found out about by looking at reports later in the day, or the delayed bid-offer that Hargreaves and many others have on their website as a free indicative quote with a 15 min rolling delay.

Anyway, he was not buying a lot, and Hargreaves Lansdown were able to get him a price of 87 for his small purchase, which happens to be closer to the published bid price than it was to the offer price that he might have to pay if he was doing a bigger order.  So, no obvious problem with that. HL have done their job just fine.

Logically the algorithm that guesses whether that transaction was a buy or a sell is going to guess it is a sell, because it is nearer to the lower price (86) than the higher price (90) and the algorithm knows that market makers usually 'win' when creating a market with a spread and acting as counterparty for investors in illiquid markets, so it stands to reason that most prices nearish to the bid will be sells and the ones nearish to the ask will be buys.

The poster says that it is definitely a buy and he has the contract note to prove it, but he says "the bid was 86.00p, the ask 90.00p so the deal price of 87p could not have been mistaken as a sell. (well below mid point)".  He seems to have made a fundamental error in that sentence, because if you have done a trade which is only 1p above bid and 3p under ask, of course it is going to be mistaken as a sell, precisely because it is 'well below mid point'.  So the data service which helps investors out by kindly guessing for them if something is more likely to be a buy or sell, mistook it for a sell, for the very excusable reason that it was closer to the bid than the ask. C'est la vie.

On trading discussion boards like LSE and ADFVN there are always conspiracy theorist nutjobs talking about how the price is being manipulated by everyone who isn't them, and coming up with interesting theories about how the market makers are walking the price up or down or getting on the offer or on the bid from time to time and what it might mean.

They get a bee in their bonnet and start asking people who pay for live 'level 2' orderbook data what is happening within that data that they don't want to subscribe to themselves because it costs a few pounds a month, but feel it would vindicate their suspicions that the marketmakers and the board and the major shareholders are ripping them off by publishing offered prices at which there won't be many (or any) trades because they end up matching at a different accepted price.

The innocent forum user (who is not trying to ramp the prices up and down by posting with multiple identities on discussion boards, honest guv) just wants to invest and get a fair return from microcap companies on the lightly-regulated AIM or NEX venue despite not being able to afford a meaningful piece of the company, and if he doesn't make profits it's probably because the damn marketmakers and brokers or the company directors screwed him over.   

Maybe what he doesn't appreciate is that the entire purpose of a market maker is to make a market and ensure a bid and offer price exist most of the time, which can mean moving the price from time to time without there being a lot of trading, or offering an attractive buy or sell price to dispose of excess stock or temporarily hoover it up for later disposal. It's just the way it is. But it's certainly better if you can blame a broker or a market maker for not being able to make as much of a killing on the stock exchange as you had hoped.  Unfortunately if you hang out on LSE or ADVFN forums you will see a lot of that stuff.

The bottom line is that in this situation:

- he was able to buy a small amount of stock closer to the low published bid price than the high published offer price. His broker did nothing wrong there, it's a good result.

- he says his transaction at a price much closer to the low published selling price than it was to the high published buying price 'could not have been mistaken as a sell', because it was 'well below mid-price', perhaps because he is an idiot who has forgotten that the prices you get for selling are usually lower than the prices you pay to buy, so it would be very easy for a trade with a low price relative to the midprice to be mistaken as a sell, which is what happened.

- he then believes that most of the data for this week is flawed because lots of people have been shown as buying and the price has been dropping so the trades are being misreported. This is certainly not the fault of his broker who got him a decent price. In his case, he was buying and the trade showed as a sell, which certainly wouldn't contribute to 'relatively heavy reported buying' over the course of the week.  But he fears foul play in some way.

Personally I would attribute it more to his naivety than to foul play.  However, there can always be foul play and manipulation and insider trading that screws over some market participants. That's one reason why a lot of people stick to largecap stocks which need bigger amounts of money to manipulate and where foul play is arguably less prevalent within the heavy volumes. AIM is the wild west. But it is more fun and the companies can in some sense be more interesting.

I came across this post from a customer of Hargreaves Lansdown in which he complained about them . On London south east 
Customer experiences that is one of the things i am looking for.

I can't see anything in that post that you quoted that would be any kind of complaint about Hargreaves Lansdown, who enabled him to buy a small amount of shares for 87p when the offer price was 90p, improving the price he had to pay by about 3% compared to the full asking price for normal market size.  That seems to be a positive customer experience rather than a negative one. Of course, a lot of other brokers would use the same trading venue and market makers so could have also got you a purchase of 632 shares for the same 87p per share

I thought you (manorhouse) said you didn't like the way this thread was going and wanted it to come back more 'on topic'. But today it seems to be johnburman who is posting useful updates from the SVS liquidation creditor's committee, and manorhouse who is posting comments about how some guy on another forum who had a good experience with Hargreaves Lansdown thinks that a particular AIM stock is being 'manipulated' or misreported by a data aggregation service, which you have inferred to be a complaint against HL and a negative customer experience.

FWIW, HL don't currently have their 'latest trades' reporting running at the moment, saying instead "Recent trade data is temporarily unavailable. We will be replacing it shortly, however in the meantime the information is available on the London Stock Exchange website."  Of course, recent trade data isn't something you need an investment platform to provide, because you can get it from the stock exchange for free or more comprehensive versions of it from subscription- or advertising-funded services like ADVFN.

manorhouse

Some effort put into that defence of HL .
I was only making the point that some customers using them are not happy , and using that to counter the suggestion that people are better off  keeping away from the much cheaper ones.
With hindsight we know i was better off for moving part of my portfolio from SVS to Degiro .  ( non uk )
I do see a bias here not sure why yet .

bowlhead99

manorhouse said:

I was only making the point that some customers using them are not happy , and using that to counter the suggestion that people are better off  keeping away from the much cheaper ones.

If some customers are not happy they will vote with their feet and leave. The person you quoted who believes that a thinly traded AIM stock is being manipulated by market makers did not say he was unhappy with HL for getting him a purchase price of 87p when full asking price for orders of normal market size was 90p. 

manorhouse said:

Some effort put into that defence of HL .

This is quite a good online community and so it is true that people will put some effort into calling out BS, because leaving BS unchallenged is damaging for other people who read the BS and don't understand what it means or why it matters but let it feed into the decisions that they make.

You found a comment made by a small investor on another forum who believed that the published bid and offer prices together with trade reporting by the industry at large on executed orders was flawed for certain thinly traded AIM stocks in which he had participated. The poster mentioned later "I accept and have said before about the system of trades identification being flawed almost useless but at least one has a chance with this relatively low traded share to highlight any abuses". In passing, he mentioned that the broker he used to execute a trade was HL and that they had provided him with a contract note. As they got him a price well within the published spread and provided him the contract note, it seems like they executed their duties flawlessly. 

His issue was that he felt that the share prices were being manipulated 'either by market makers or others including directors of the company'. The fact that the stockbroker he used to place his trade at a good price was Hargreaves Lansdown is neither here.  However, you copied and pasted his February post from that other forum onto this thread in April and presented it as "a post from a customer of Hargreaves Lansdown in which he complained about them". 

There is nothing in that quoted post on London South East's BRD forum that would mean that HL would be worse for you as a broker than SVS or DeGiro or any number of others.

Unfortunately as many here would not even know what the London South East forum is, what their conspiracy theorist forum members are talking about when they discuss the manipulation of the Blue Rock Diamonds share price, or the mechanics of trade reporting, it is not very useful for people here to just bat away your contribution as irrelevant - it is more useful to say why it is not relevant so that people don't think "hmm this could be important, I had better not open an account with HL because they seem to get lots of complaints based on what manorhouse is telling us".  That's why my posts are generally more than one liners, as I am trying to help people understand things. I do not use HL myself.  My parents have accounts with them, FWIW, and the service is fine. 

I do see a bias here not sure why yet .

It is a bias against bad information and jumping to flawed conclusions.

masonic

manorhouse said:

Some effort put into that defence of HL .
I was only making the point that some customers using them are not happy , and using that to counter the suggestion that people are better off  keeping away from the much cheaper ones.

I seem to recall I expressed some very negative views of HL around the point they introduced their platform fee and dug my heels in regarding being released from their £25 per stock transfer fee when I decided to leave them some years ago. However, I'm not sufficiently biased to nod along to some outrageous conspiracy theories about them being part of an elite who secretly manipulate markets in order to frustrate the efforts of private investors traders.

manorhouse said:

With hindsight we know i was better off for moving part of my portfolio from SVS to Degiro .

We don't yet have the hindsight to know whether you were better off. The outcome of the SVS administration is not yet known, and Degiro is not yet in administration (or whatever the Dutch equivalent of administration is).

manorhouse said:

( non uk )

Can you comprehend that there is a difference between "non uk" and "non-FSCS protected"? You've effectively branded other posters racists in this thread while failing to understand this important difference.