I remember Thatcher’s 80’s. I was a young life assurance salesman at Abbey Life. I managed to get a few hundred quid together to take part in the share offers. I remember “Tell Sid” as I am sure many of you do too.
The thinking back then was the government always left some profit on the table to get the privatisations away. I profited from Norweb and Manweb etc. and So I decided to try to obtain some Royal Mail shares for each of my discretionary clients.
I decided to try to add 3%,5% & 7% to the portfolios of my cautious, moderate and aggressive clients respectively. After much calculation and individual ordering across all of our clients, Vince Cable saw to it that nobody would prosper by much! All orders above £10000 were turned-down, all other amounts only received £750 worth. No client was successful via Nucleus as the orders were aggregated which meant they were all too high to qualify.
So to cut a long story short, most of my clients applications were unsuccessful and the successful ones only received £750 worth each. We applied for £1.7 million worth of shares but were limited to only £36,000 worth! But the share offer did receive 7 times more applications than the government was expecting.
So I am disappointed to say the least, considering the institutions got twice the amount private investors got and consequently made a killing. If we would have got all of our allocation clients would have had a windfall collectively of nearly £700,000! Instead 48 lucky individuals are now £250 better off. I am only pleased I hadn’t told my clients and built up their hopes.
Better to have tried and failed, than to never have tried at all. Upwards and onwards.