Member Info for BlueBiscuit

Ah - I just found an earlier thread ("Evraz Loss to Offset CGT") which suggests that the answer is no. But if anything has changed in the intervening few months, I'd be very interested. I understand that HMRC does not currently list Evraz on their list of NV companies, but their webpages suggest that it's still possible to submit a claim ("You’ll need to give full and comprehensive information that shows the shares or securities have become of negligible value....")

Hi all -

I just learned about the concept of 'negligible value claims', which (if I understand correctly) would let me realise a capital loss on my modest EVR holding. I've got some other stuff in a GIA that I'd really like to sell, and being able to offset these gains would be quite handy (I'd obviously prefer for my shares to bounce back to their pre-invasion highs, but if I could at least realise the loss that would be better than nothing). Has anyone here had experience making a NegValue claim for their Evraz holding ? Thanks for any info...

Hah, same here ! It seems that II hasn't reduced the quantity in my account yet. I'm tempted to sell the lot to see what happens :)

Ah never mind, I think I figured it out. The opening price of the Dowlais shares on 20th April was actually 146p. So Yahoo (and others) are assuming that anyone holding Melrose at the open would have received a "dividend" worth 146p (I know it's not a true dividend, but the effect is the same). They then go back and reduce the pre-split prices to reflect this amount. So, the adjusted price for 19th becomes (161*3 - 146) = ~338p.

I think I was getting confused, because I know that the "cost basis" of the Melrose shares should be split 77.9 : 22.1 based on their closing prices at EOD 20th. I was therefore assuming that the Dowlais shares would also have been issued at an initial price of 107p, which I now see is wrong.

Much clearer now, thanks all. Whew !

Ugh sorry - post got chopped. Basically, the price for 19th now shows as 338. The price for 20th shows as 413p. That implies a 22% profit, not 9%. What's going on !? I'm totally confused

Hi all. New poster here. I've recently been trying to make sense of what happened to my Melrose shares during the recent demerger event. I have a pretty of the events that occurred "in real life", but I'm having trouble mapping this onto the price charts that I see on sites like Yahoo!, Google Finance and elsewhere. Can anyone help please ?

I know that there was a 3:1 share consolidation on April 19th, followed by a demerger. The Melrose share price closed at ~162p on April 19th (I think !). By EOD 20th, it was trading at 413p. Dowlais closed at 117p. That works out to a 9% one-day profit.

So far, good. The problem is that when I look at the price history for Melrose, I see the following :

19th April : close = 338p //

First time poster here. I've held DEC shares for a couple of years. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I won't be participating in the offer. I don't much like the fact that we're given only a few hours to decide, and I especially don't like the fact that II is asking me to commit cash upfront, without any idea what the final price will be. Maybe you'll end up getting a tasty discount, but who knows ?

Reminds me of the old Blackadder joke about what to do if you step on a landmine : "Well the normal procedure is to leap 200 feet into the air and scatter yourself over a large area". Put simply, there's nothing you can do, so the sensible thing is to find other things to occupy yourself with.

I'd just about given up on my modest position in JRS but was interested to see that it's the 2nd best performer in my pofo over the past month, up 21%. Still down 88% from the peak but it's nice to see a glimmer of life (or is that just the corpse twitching one last time before rigor mortis sets in ?)

Me too. I've recently been sorting out the shareholding of a deceased relative (all paper) and it's been a nightmare. £50 fee to issue replacement certificates, £70 fee to sell the shares via Equiniti's postal service etc. What a rip-off. I'd much rather have mine sitting in some database somewhere.

"Buy and hold for 5 years is idiotic". Not sure I agree, the bigger idiots are those who think they can divine the value of a company's stock better than millions of informed investors around the globe. Mountains of research proves that the more frequently you trade, the worse your results. So pick a few stocks at random (or better yet, buy an index), then go away for 20 years and do something more interesting.

It's not dead, it's resting ! Probably pining for the fjords

@Schwee, i've been trying to untangle the tax impact of the dividend and I agree with your analysis. I'll declare "income" equal to the market value of the shares at the end of the distribution date, and I'll then continue as if I had purchased the Woodside shares for the same amount of money. That way, HMRC gets its due and I think everyone's happy. I have recently been batting with the details of a return-of-capital event for Aviva, and I must say the dividend-based approach is a lot simpler, even if the tax tends to be a bit more punitive.

Possibly a stupid question : what's the "NHI surcharge" ?

@WM -- https://www.cuemath.com/numbers/bodmas-rule/ :)

Thanks again MrM, I have a small loss too, but more importantly I can sleep soundly knowing that I can defend the numbers I put on my SA return ! Very educational thread, I now understand RoC events a lot better than I use to.

I think you're reading it wrong, WM. You do the division first, like this : 1.0169n(1 – (u/(1.0169 + 0.76q))). For my little example below, the formula gives an answer of 85K which is right on the nose.

Sorry, typo below. Imagine you had bought at 300p, not 350

At the risk of boring poor old popper4 ever further, here's a response to @longtime's earlier Q. Longtime, Imagine what would happen if you had bought a million quid back when the price was, say, 350p. By the time of the distribution, the price has risen to around 400p and you are sitting on unrealized gains of 333K. Agree so far ? What we're saying is that the cash distribution will trigger an immediate CGT bill of approx 25% of this amount, or 80K. The total amount of the distribution is NOT taxable. However, the gain (anything in excess of the original cost) will be taxable. Mr Math's formula gives the precise amount.

@longtime -- that's true if the total amount of capital returned is < £3000. It depends on the size of your holding. See https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/capital-gains-manual/cg57835 ("you may also accept that TCGA92/S122 (2) can apply in cases where the distribution is £3,000 or less - whether or not this amounts to 5 per cent or less of the value of the shares in respect of which it is distributed. "). If the distribution is above this 5%/£3000 threshold, then the disposal is assumed to have happened on May 16th and MrM's calc is correct, afaik.

Thanks MrT, just saw your post but i'm very happy to get the additional clarification :)

Thanks, MrMath. I think I get it now. The redemption of the B shares is treated as an "disposal" in HMRC's eyes, hence triggering an immediate (potential) CGT gain

In the past, I have received smaller returns-of-capital but I have always dealt with them by reducing the acquisition cost when I finally got around to selling (following the law around "small" holdings in https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/12/section/122/enacted section 2). But I understand now that, because this particular RoC does not fall under the "small" guidelines, I need to treat it as an immediate disposal.

Thank you for clarifying !!