Mis-Sold Shares

Martyfunkhouser wrote: »

He then said that Vodafone was a far better investment and he persuaded me to put all my money in Vodafone rather than Telco.

Was he right? Vodafone went on to be a massive global player worth £50 billion plus, and has paid a steady rising stream of dividends over the 18 years. How did your initial 'tip' of Telco - a company you didn't know anything about - do by comparison?

Did Telco perhaps also lose half or more of its value in the dot-com crash 18 years ago? What happened to it? And even if Telco was a better end result it wasn't necessarily a dumb suggestion to buy Vodafone instead which seemed like a decent company with strong market position (if very expensive, back in '99/2000, just like other telecoms shares were).

When you use a broker to buy shares you can do it with advice, or more cheaply, execution only without advice. If you go for the advised version you get access to their house recommendations which are opinions based on research, but not guarantees of performance over a specific time period. They are basically tips.

The shares proceeded to fall and a few years later I sold them for half what I paid. I never dealt with Edward Jones again.

Did they advise you to sell the shares? Or was it, as I suspect, that you lost money because you decided to sell your assets for less than you had paid for them instead of waiting for a turnaround in their performance.

Even 18 years ago, pretty much everyone in the country had seen or heard the "small print" that investments can go down as well as up. It is the sort of thing people know off by heart, just like "your home may be at risk if you do not keep up your mortgage repayments". Even kids who don't have houses or investments have heard it. So if you pick an individual company to buy its shares, whether someone "advises" you that it might be a good idea, you can't have been unaware it may lose you money if you sell it at a price below what you paid.

I have just received a letter from Hallbrook a company claiming they can get me compensated if I was mis-sold shares.

Let me guess, it was a letter /cold call out of the blue. Either they will want administration fees to process a dubious claim which can only be filed if you give them accurate information; or you'll have to give them all your personal details for free and they will take a huge cut out of anything on the offchance it's successful.

Like any ambulance-chasers, if you actually have all the details from the time, you could claim yourself, to the company that wronged you and then chance your arm with an ombudsman, and pay nothing to the ambulance chasers, keeping what's rightfully yours, all to yourself.

However, if you tried to pursue it one obvious issue is - if they sold you something duff and you had a genuine complaint, why didn't you complain a decade and a half ago when you encountered the problem. Rather than waiting until the problem was so far in the past that it was totally unrealistic to get anything back and the company have archived any records relating to it.

My Questions are, firstly do I have a valid claim,

Doubt it

secondly is Hallbrook legit

Do they exist? Quite possibly

Do they make money by scraping old shareholder lists of popular shares and giving them false hope that normal market losses can be recovered? That seems to be the case

Should you give them all your personal data and pay them fees? No.

and finally what are my chances of reclaiming my loss.

It's nice to think you can, but really, the chance is nil.

After all Edward Jones talked me out of what I wanted and into a poor investment?

They talked and you listened to the common sense they were making, and were dissuaded from following your mate's tip. No crime there. If you had wanted to follow your mate's tip without knowing anything about shares, you still could have done.

They couldn't guarantee the investment was the very best thing to buy. It was your choice to buy a share of a large and successful company and sell out at a low value when the market value for telecoms companies was lower.

They offered advice and having received the advice you decided to follow it rather than reject it, which you could have done. Now because an ambulance chaser has come out of the blue and appears to be offering potential riches, you are tempted. Buy they did not come out of the blue with the aim of improving your lot in life. They came with the aim of improving theirs. And will spam hundreds or thousands of people on their 'potential mugs' list every day, hoping that in the end, some people will take them up on it and there will be some genuine claim opportunity among them.