Selling shares with a certificate

R4chy_2

Hi Everyone

Firstly I'd like to apologise as I am sure this will have been covered already, but I am not very good when it comes to things like this so I thought I'd ask anyway

I have some shares on a certificate that I would like to sell. These are shares that I bought through a share save scheme at work. When I was made redundant I obviously had to exit the scheme and the shares that I had were transferred onto a share certificate.

I am thinking about selling the shares but I don't have a clue about how to do this. I know you can buy and sell shares online, but I'm not sure if you can do this when you have the shares on a certificate. Also I don't really want to open an account to then have to close it (I will only be selling these shares, I won't be buying any so it isn't worth having an account).

Please can you recommend the best/cheapest option or point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance.
Rach

Thrugelmir

Who do you bank with?

Owain_Moneysaver

The company share Registrar may offer a share dealing service - check their website under Corporate or Shareholder information.

Note that if you sell the shares yourself, you may have a Capital Gains Tax liability to meet.

You could donate them to charity through eg CAF or Sharegift. You won't have to pay CGT and can claim income tax relief.

crumpetman

https://www.x-o.co.uk/

£5.95 flat rate per trade.

Used them a couple of times for selling sharesave shares. No harm in opening an account with them even if you use it once, there's no charge for having an account.

george4064

You could transfer them into electronic format, known as 'lodging share certificates'.

You could do it via HL, https://www.hl.co.uk

Very easy to speak on the phone with them and ask what you need to do to arrange this, then you can sell them online for £11.95

R4chy_2

Thanks everyone

I bank with Lloyds and Nationwide. From what I can gather Nationwide don't deal with shares and Lloyds I will have to set up an account.

I will have a look at the options you have suggested above. Thank you so much for your replies xx

Ifts

R4chy wrote: »

I am thinking about selling the shares but I don't have a clue about how to do this. I know you can buy and sell shares online, but I'm not sure if you can do this when you have the shares on a certificate.

As suggested by crumpetman you could use X-O.co.uk share dealing services (£5.95 per trade) for a cheap method of selling the shares.

Open a Share Dealing account with X-O.co.uk - free to open and no annual account charges - then transfer your share certificates in to your account (to be safe send the shares in by registered post) and sell them for £5.95 per share holding.

How do I transfer in stock that I hold in the form of certificates?

https://www.x-o.co.uk/how-to.html#transfer-certs

What markets can I deal in?

https://www.x-o.co.uk/how-to.html#markets

Also I don't really want to open an account to then have to close it (I will only be selling these shares, I won't be buying any so it isn't worth having an account).

In that case you could use: http://www.sellmysharecertificates.com/

(also part of Jarvis Investment Management Ltd) and sell at a fixed commission of £22.50 per holding.

admin25

Some useful information there. However a question for you all:-
my recently deceased father-in-law left shares to his son & daughter in four different companies (we hold the share certificates) & are registered with two different on-line registrars. Do we have to sell them through these two companies one of which have high fees for selling the shares.

bowlhead99

admin25 said:

Some useful information there. However a question for you all:-
my recently deceased father-in-law left shares to his son & daughter in four different companies (we hold the share certificates) & are registered with two different on-line registrars. Do we have to sell them through these two companies one of which have high fees for selling the shares.

If you would want to sell the shares before transferring them into the names of the son and daughter and you have paper certificates and no stockbroker relationship elsewhere, it is often much easier to have the existing registrars do it (rather than trying to open an account in the name of a dead person or his estate's executors/administrators). 

Even if you don't want to sell them and split the cash, and instead get the registrars to re register the holdings in the name of the new beneficiaries on instruction from the executors for the beneficiaries to do with as they please - if the beneficiaries want to sell the shares it will likely be easiest to just use whatever service the registrar provides. 

Remember that companies listed on the stock exchange can change their value by several percent in a day, and the price change even over the course of a relatively boring week could be 10%+. If the son and daughter intend to sell the shares it would be frustrating if they decide that the executors should use a cheaper broker to save £20 of dealing fees, and then the price falls and by the time the new broker is able to place their order on the stock market, their sales proceeds are £200 lower.

admin25

Hi bowlhead99
Many thanks for the info.

LobsterMemory

Conversely, the beneficiaries might well say, why have you wasted 500 quid when you could have sold them for 30.
While bowlhead is careful to say that shares COULD change by 10% in a week, in most cases they don't and the bigger the company, the less likely they will - I'm now being careful, as of course they might

I have 30 shares in all shapes and sizes and I check the prices each week. My threshold for a Wow-factor is if there's been a change of more than 1%. A change of 10% in any of the shares is a blue-moon moment.

I'm guessing that the registrar with the high fees is Equiniti. Personally, as an individual and an executor, I couldn't justify to myself that their fees weren't exorbitant - though accept that it's easier to go through them- so I asked them to transfer the certificates to my name and then transferred those certificates to an online broker and sold them from there.for a tenner apiece.

As an executor you can't lose whichever way you choose - either you say that you went for the high fees to reduce risk or went for the lower cost in order to potentially maximise proceeds. Might be worth discussing with the beneficiaries what they want to do