If you hold shares in a personal favourite of mine, Personal Assets, you are in for a big surprise on Monday.
The price now is about £490. This effectively excludes small investors. Maybe a saver does have £1,000 and can buy two shares but it’s not possible to reinvest dividends, or to sell a small part of the holding to raise a hundred pounds or so, or to save a small amount monthly. On Monday the price will be about £4.90 and shares in personal Assets will be accessible to all savers great and small. Existing shareholders will be given 100 shares for each share they hold so the value of their holding will be the same as before the share split, as it’s known.
Earlier this month Glaxo had a reverse split. There has seldom been so much excitement in my ISA. The consumer healthcare division of Glaxo has been de-merged and existing shareholders given five shares in the new company for every four they own in Glaxo. The new company is called Haleon, pronounced hay-lee-on; why? Amazing some advertising executive got paid to invent the name. It’s supposed to suggest “hale” meaning in good health and “leon” or lion to suggest strength; we will see.
You may remember almost exactly a year ago I bit the bullet and took a 29% loss in Marks and Spencer, switching into Babcock International. It was risky and may still go horribly wrong but so far M&S hasn’t changed much and Babcock has risen by 15%. We will see.
Scottish Mortgage and Monks remain a drag on my portfolio but both trade at discounts to Net Asset Value and both are still showing a profit because I bought them ages ago. Vietnam is still doing well. Overall I have lost about 16% from the high watermark in the autumn last year.
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At Downton the dastardly Thomas has kidnapped Lord Grantham’s Yellow Labrador, Isis, and hidden her in a shed in the woods. It’s grand to know Julian Fellowes reads PG Wodehouse. The real Lady Carnarvon has Yellow Labradors and I don’t know if Isis really belongs to her. Isis is an apt name referencing the Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon. In fact Yellow Labradors were not bred until the mid 20th century and Lord Grantham might have had a Golden Labrador.