Totally agree. This is a scandalous waste of money. Even with covid completely eliminated the rate of positive cases detected can only fall as low as the false positive rate of the test. Wish they would use people who can really run the numbers instead of the politically motivated second raters that they currently listen too, though I do understand that the true top people would not want their names associated with these shenanigans.
"Scientifically there's no logic for a vaccine to cause blood clots."
It's not in dispute that covid causes blood clots, so it's certainly not inconceivable that a vaccine intended to help the body produce similar antibodies to which covid would induce could also cause blood clots. However, the same could be said of the other vaccines. Anyway, I am quite happy with my investment here.
Doesn't sound like you've made enough profit to have to pay tax, but you should always keep a record of your transactions.
All you need to do to calculate your capital gain is to go to: http://www.cgtcalculator.com/calculator.aspx
and enter your transactions in the following format:
B 12/05/2019 BP 7750 5.7389 12.95 222.38
S 01/04/2020 BP 4000 2.4550 12.95 0.00
and press calculate. There are seven columns, which you just copy and paste from the spreadsheet where you keep your transaction data (and if you don't have one, now's a good time to start). The first column indicates whether it's a buy or sell, the second is the date, the third the ticker, the fourth the number of shares, the fifth the price, the sixth the transaction costs and the seventh is any tax (stamp duty).
"the only way to make money is to invest in firms for the long term that you believe in"
That's the way I invest and the reason why I'm in GSK. Although I do allow myself the odd foray on AIM (not this financial year ) but only with some of the profits from my usual strategy.
This has been a great share: capital 40% up and now a record dividend!
"wait for the trend to end"
That's a tricky one. In the long run you lose more than you gain when trying to time the market. GSK is incredible value at the moment. I do not believe a senior vice president of the company would have just bought £224k of their shares if they thought they were going to lose!
GSK is still good for income as it would take a massive drop in the aggregate dividend after the split to take us down to the levels that most other FTSE100 companies are paying (e.g. currently we're at 6.26% and dropping this to 4% is a cut of over a third). We are also at a good price for capital growth too.
"Sell GSK NOT EVEN @1700"
Would have to be over 3000 before I would even consider selling some of my holding, as I am here for the dividends as I expect a lot of us are. So destroying the dividends is the only thing they could do that would make me sell, but that's no different from most of my other shares.
"Remember to enter a limit sell price on your holdings in your brokerage account - it might stop the rot of your brokers loaning your stock."
Not according to this article it doesn't:
This is completely untrue. As others mentioned, you must request a certificate of your stock in order to be in possession and keep them from being borrowed. Most brokers do not do this because the make a percentage for the transaction. Otherwise, with a fully funded account you can collect these interest rates/rebates yourself. Your broker is the holder of your position and reserves the right to loan your shares at any given time. This is written in your brokerage agreement and if not readily available you can give them a call.
Setting a high limit order gives the clearing firm or third party that your broker may or may be under contract with the ability to see where your position will possibly be sold and gives them the opportunity to continually sell and buy back, some times hundreds of times in a matter of minutes, your position. With high frequency trading this often happens from algorithms or a “black box”.
Furthermore, there are plenty of contractors and promoters working the chat rooms and forums telling people falsely that if they set high limit orders they will protect their positions. But actually, they are misleading them in order to scope their possible exits for the reasons previously mentioned and put selling pressure on the order book.
Many argue that these practices are a conflict of interest and rightfully so. Beware people on reputable sites like this that carelessly give you false information because they may have different motives than “trying to help”, especially if they think it doesn’t affect your position. When brokers negligently loan out shares that aren’t available, it can cause a “short squeeze” that could send a Security to extreme highs (DRYS 2016).
Ref: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-putting-a-high-limit-sell-order-will-prevent-shorts-from-borrowing-your-shares#:~:text=1%20year%20ago-,Is%20it%20true%20that%20putting%20a%20high%20limit%20sell%20order,keep%20them%20from%20being%20borrowed.
I use google sheets. The GoogleFinance command, =GoogleFinance("LON:GSK", "price"), gets you the GSK share price etc and you can "scrape" the yield data without too much trouble from yahoo finance using
=IMPORTXML("https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GSK.L","//*[@id='quote-summary']/div[2]/table/tbody/tr[6]/td[2]")
and split this data into two columns using
=SPLIT(E8, " ()"), where E8 for example was the square where you put the yahoo data.
It's great to have everything in one place. Much better than my broker's info, and it's free!
"the merest hint of a dividend cut in the distant future is enough to wipe £8 billion of the shareprice. Whereas some companies that have cancelled their dividends come out unscathed."
Saying you're likely to do something negative creates anxiety and fear, whereas actually doing it removes that fear as it's a done deal. No company can be 100% certain that they can maintain or increase dividends in more than a year's time, so it would have been better, and in a some sense more honest, to have said nothing.
Anyway, it's these sort of mistakes that give the wise a chance to top up.
Can't ask for a better buying opportunity.