US based Phoenix Financial Services

verybigchris

A relative of mine fell for one of these scams.

He got a call exactly like the OP, promoting some obscure share he'd never heard of. He knew it was a scam straight away, but assumed the scammers were trying to get money off him directly, and that as long as he didn't send them any cash he'd be okay.

Off he went to research this share, and sure enough he saw it was on the up, and there were a lot of blog posts recommending it as a "buy". So he went ahead and invested, boasting that he'd beaten the scammers at their own game by using their info but not giving them a penny.

Sure enough, the share was only going up because the scammers had bought it themselves, the blog posts were all written by them, and when they dumped their holdings the price tumbled, and my relative ended up with a load of worthless shares.

Sad thing is, even then he didn't realise that he'd been scammed. I think to this day he still believes he outsmarted the scammers and just got unlucky with the investment

PotentialEnergy

I respect the VeryBigChris feedback on a relative's experience but I have got my seed money back.
It was a dangerous play but for once is currently in my favour.

Aretnap

cogito wrote: »

If Fundsmith owned 1% of every company in his fund, it would need to be several times its present size. Every single stock is highly liquid.

Any comparison with Woodford is absurd.

Admittedly this is getting off topic, but there was a study recently which did some rough calculations on how quickly various funds could sell of their holdings without significantly affecting the share prices, based on the normal trading volumes of their holdings. The conclusion was that the time it would take to liquidate Woodford's fund without a firesale of at least some holdings is measured in years; with Terry Smith's it is measured in hours.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-7170633/amp/Truth-Woodfords-unwanted-fund-stockpile-20-TIMES-longer-shift-rivals.html

(Apols for Daily Mail link)

There are good reasons why investors might avoid fund like Fundsmith; but concern about liquidity and a potential Woodford scenario is not one of them.