As I have said before and I am a retired qualified accountant, we now have some accounting standards which are beyond the easy comprehension of the man in the street. This ought not to be and the "accountancy bodies" responsible should be ashamed of themselves and repent. The only way to properly establish the true value of any asset is to sell it in a free market and all so called valuations are mere conjecture (fact). In an English court of law conjecture (guess work) is not permitted and will always be dimissed by learned judges and yet businesses such as L & G are being forced to apply such doubtful "principles". It is not surprising then that application of these rules are almost impossible to understand by most people and the results can vary hugely from one week to the next; they are in fact absolutely crackers.
Bertram, I wanted to do the same last year but according to LSE the HMRC rules don't allow a straight transfer as one might hope, you have to sell the holding from wherever it currently sits and repurchase it into the ISA. This might sound like LSE making money from you which is true but folk would soon go elsewhere for their transactions if LSE were not being straight with them. I vaguely recall some sort of discount when I gave them my insructions last year.
Just bought in myself after looking around for somwhere to place a £few thousand this morning. This could well be regarded as a "defence" stock in the not too distant future as there is not much chance of their regular cash flows being affected by anything except a significant fall in energy prices. Not saying that could not happen but they have probably already fallen as much as is likely.
Some of the posts that have appeared on here recently confirm an oft repeated family proverb of mine:- "Much of the population is unable to think clearly and logically and that is why people do things all the time which do not make sense." Putin is a first class example if you want one.
I guess that by now most have forgotten that a few weeks ago Citi put out a deramping comment which had the effect of pushing down the SP for a week or two. One does wonder how much some rascals made from that little exercise and is yet another warning that so called broker ratings can be very unreliable if not disingenuous.
Amazing amount of ignorant and ill-inforned garbage being posted on here. It does not seem to enter some heads that insurance is unlike any other business and is known to have a rough time occasionally irrespective of management ability. That is why the Lloyds system of rich "names" exists - so that underwriters know that there is a large pile of wealth to rely upon when disaster strikes as it surely will from time to time.