SVS Securities - shut down?

Thrugelmir

pafpcg said:

bowlhead99 said:

........
For example for a simple cheap UK brokerage (which has no ongoing custody fee and easy conversion to paper shares if wanted) the Jarvis service at x-o.co.uk has been fine for me, ............

Mentioning of Jarvis X-O reminds me that I got a glimpse of a new feature at JarvisX-O yesterday.  There will be the option to withdraw funds to our nominated bank account directly from the web-site, rather than having to email the request.  When I queried why it wasn't working for me, I got a rapid response along the lines of: "You shouldn't have seen that!  It's in a new release of the web-site that's still being tested."  Ah, well - so long as it's ready for July 24th (or whenever I can extricate my ex-SVS assets from INI).

What did you glimpse? 

infoatIntel_Suisse_com

Intel Suisse have been looking at some of the money trail of SVS and then Corporate Finance Bonds Limited (CFBL). Liquidators should not right off CFBL.  Assets and some money should be recovered. Investors who are worried and want more pressure on recovery can contact intel-suisse   com 

infoatIntel_Suisse_com

leonde said:

leonde said:

I intend to email Leonard Curtis again sometime for an up-to-date statement so I can keep up with the dividend payments in my records. Based on what today's update says regarding tax statements ("The Administrators will issue tax statements for the periods from 6 April 2019 to 5 April 2020 and from  6  April  2020  to  11  June  2020.    Thereafter,  following  the  transfer,  ITI  will  take  on  the responsibility for the production of tax statements."), I guess now is as good a day as any other. I just hope ITI will be keeping track of subsequent payments otherwise it'll be a bit of a hassle for me.

LC tell me that 11th June was the "legal transfer" date, but they will provide statements for any further account activity up to the "physical transfer" date (sometime between now and the 23rd July).

I hear Leonard Curtis are writing CFBL down to zero. It's just not good enough. Intel Suisse have been looking at some of the money trail of SVS and then Corporate Finance Bonds Limited (CFBL). Liquidators should not right off CFBL.  Assets and some money should be recovered. Investors who are worried and want more pressure on recovery can contact intel-suisse   com 

pafpcg

masonic said:

pafpcg said:

Perhaps INI...

I can't resist asking, why do you refer to ITI as INI? Am I missing a joke?

The joke is: my memory!  Too many years of dealing with ICI, ITT, ENI.....  Thanks for pointing it out.

pafpcg

Thrugelmir said:

pafpcg said:

bowlhead99 said:

........
For example for a simple cheap UK brokerage (which has no ongoing custody fee and easy conversion to paper shares if wanted) the Jarvis service at x-o.co.uk has been fine for me, ............

Mentioning of Jarvis X-O reminds me that I got a glimpse of a new feature at JarvisX-O yesterday.  There will be the option to withdraw funds to our nominated bank account directly from the web-site, rather than having to email the request.  When I queried why it wasn't working for me, I got a rapid response along the lines of: "You shouldn't have seen that!  It's in a new release of the web-site that's still being tested."  Ah, well - so long as it's ready for July 24th (or whenever I can extricate my ex-SVS assets from INI).

What did you glimpse? 

Err, - the second sentence in my post?
As expected, it's disappeared now.  It was an option (between the options "Statement details" and "Make Payment" on the "Cash" tab, entitled something like "Withdraw to account".  The fields in the option were a drop-down box to select the account to which funds should be sent and a box for entering the value of the funds to be sent.  Pretty much what you'd expect - it surprised me that Jarvis didn't offer such a facility from the start!

masonic

infoatIntel_Suisse_com said:

leonde said:

leonde said:

I intend to email Leonard Curtis again sometime for an up-to-date statement so I can keep up with the dividend payments in my records. Based on what today's update says regarding tax statements ("The Administrators will issue tax statements for the periods from 6 April 2019 to 5 April 2020 and from  6  April  2020  to  11  June  2020.    Thereafter,  following  the  transfer,  ITI  will  take  on  the responsibility for the production of tax statements."), I guess now is as good a day as any other. I just hope ITI will be keeping track of subsequent payments otherwise it'll be a bit of a hassle for me.

LC tell me that 11th June was the "legal transfer" date, but they will provide statements for any further account activity up to the "physical transfer" date (sometime between now and the 23rd July).

I hear Leonard Curtis are writing CFBL down to zero. It's just not good enough. Intel Suisse have been looking at some of the money trail of SVS and then Corporate Finance Bonds Limited (CFBL). Liquidators should not right off CFBL.  Assets and some money should be recovered. Investors who are worried and want more pressure on recovery can contact intel-suisse   com 

It's in investors best interests for CFBL to be written down to zero. That enables them to claim the maximum compensation from FSCS.

Thrugelmir

pafpcg said:

Thrugelmir said:

pafpcg said:

bowlhead99 said:

........
For example for a simple cheap UK brokerage (which has no ongoing custody fee and easy conversion to paper shares if wanted) the Jarvis service at x-o.co.uk has been fine for me, ............

Mentioning of Jarvis X-O reminds me that I got a glimpse of a new feature at JarvisX-O yesterday.  There will be the option to withdraw funds to our nominated bank account directly from the web-site, rather than having to email the request.  When I queried why it wasn't working for me, I got a rapid response along the lines of: "You shouldn't have seen that!  It's in a new release of the web-site that's still being tested."  Ah, well - so long as it's ready for July 24th (or whenever I can extricate my ex-SVS assets from INI).

What did you glimpse? 

Err, - the second sentence in my post?
As expected, it's disappeared now.  It was an option (between the options "Statement details" and "Make Payment" on the "Cash" tab, entitled something like "Withdraw to account".  The fields in the option were a drop-down box to select the account to which funds should be sent and a box for entering the value of the funds to be sent.  Pretty much what you'd expect - it surprised me that Jarvis didn't offer such a facility from the start!

Taken time to build the retail brand. Totally organic, i.e. self funded,  no debt. No advertising and marketing spend either . 

manorhouse

A clip from a well known blog below.
I read  they were coming to UK for some time ago , maybe the regulation issues have now been sorted.
Any experiences or views ?

More than a million Americans a month opened a brokerage account with Robinhood in the first quarter of this year, most of them new to trading. The attraction: Robinhood charges no commission at all and you need just $1 to open an account. And now, as you can see below, it is coming to the UK this year. Great news or worrying news? It depends who you are. I start with my long held belief that traditional retail brokers like Hargreaves Lansdown  (HL) and AJ Bell (AJB) rip folks off with execution only charges that are far too high.

Thrugelmir

They'll make their money somewhere. Nothings for free. Appeal to the wannabe day traders rather than people who invest in the more esoteric sectors of the markets. 

Etoro already offers commission free trading as an example. Only room for so many.  

bowlhead99

manorhouse said:

A clip from a well known blog below.
I read  they were coming to UK for some time ago , maybe the regulation issues have now been sorted.
Any experiences or views ?

More than a million Americans a month opened a brokerage account with Robinhood in the first quarter of this year, most of them new to trading. The attraction: Robinhood charges no commission at all and you need just $1 to open an account. And now, as you can see below, it is coming to the UK this year. Great news or worrying news? It depends who you are. I start with my long held belief that traditional retail brokers like Hargreaves Lansdown  (HL) and AJ Bell (AJB) rip folks off with execution only charges that are far too high.

No experience of it as I haven't used it. When they launch in the UK  it will be with a US custodian and the account will run in dollars, a bit like etoro does (there is no fx fee to convert the pounds you deposit into dollars, and you can get a snapshot portfolio value  or withdrawable amount shown to you in pounds). Not all stocks you might want will be available, and some asset types they currently offer their US customers (e.g. ETFs, options) won't be available due to the extra regulation needed to support offering those things to UK retail customers.

Although the account will be free, they'll charge $5 a month if you want the 'gold' service where you get level 2 market information  and the ability to trade on margin. $5 a month is cheap for level 2, but if they are only offering 1700 of the biggest global stocks it's presumably not going to help you see all the behind-the-scenes orderbook for an AIM tiddler stock, because they probably won't be offering such stocks - and level 2 information is not going to give you much insight on big stocks such as Apple or HSBC where high frequency traders are changing the order book several times a second.  They've signed up literally millions of customers in the US, typically millennials who love trading via apps rather than old-school web pages, and want to invest in cool sounding companies they've heard of, or perhaps based on stock tips for penny shares shared globally via social media; those customers are probably not fussed whether all the smallcap UK companies are available, so it may just be the FTSE 350 and the more liquid smaller ones.

Given it's all set up through a US brokerage structure you're unlikely to have an easy way to transfer your assets in specie to them from another UK broker, or out the other way. And the FAQ talks about the stocks being insured through the US SIPC rather than UK FSCS - greater protection in terms of value covered, but based on foreign laws.

An article here (https://www.thestreet.com/investing/how-does-robinhood-make-money-14856528) from early 2019 shows some of the ways they get revenues from their 'free' products. In December they had a >$1m fine from FINRA for failing to give their customers best execution.  Didn't stop them adding a few million new customers in Q1 this year. In March their system went down for a couple of the days at the worst point of the corona-induced crash, causing lots of those customers to be unable to trade during the greatest one-day rise for years. They apologised. 

On the positive side, their coming into the market willing to make operational losses to acquire customers rapidly and offering stuff for free that other brokers charged money for, had a very positive effect on the US brokerage market, resulting in Ameritrade and Schwab etc dropping their prices to compete and try to similarly make their money from sidelines rather than straight trading commission. The US market was already a cheap place for trading compared to the UK average, and they helped it get cheaper.

In the UK/Europe we have the likes of freetrade and etoro and trading212 letting you trade for free, so another new entrant doesn't necessarily shake it up too much, especially as they will be leveraging their US infrastructure and not initially offering things like ISAs or ETF access which the others have (the latter will be in the pipeline, not sure about the former).

However, even if the UK side of the business is not very profitable and turns out to be a worse offering than some UK/European fintech rivals, Robinhood's scale from the US operation and the financial backers already in place for a business valued in the billions, may give them the clout to stay in business with more longevity than a relative minnow like a Freetrade or T212. Which is important, as people on this thread know all too well the pain of having stocks with a broker that goes out of business requiring a solution to be found to get your assets back.