The Share Centre recently advised their customers of “Our Future with Interactive Investor”. It gave details of the transfer of accounts to the Interactive Investor platform following the acquisition of the Share Centre business. However they failed to point out one important point which customers need to be aware of.
Share Centre ISAs are “Flexi ISAs”. This means that you can take cash out of the ISA and put it back in so long as you do it in the same tax year. Many people may have taken cash out this year after stock markets fell and put it on deposit, with the intention of putting back in later.
But Interactive Investor do not offer a Flexi ISA so if a Share Centre customer took cash out they won’t be able to put it back in after the account transfer. The Share Centre should surely have warned people about this but I can see no reference to it in their literature.
Spoofing
There was a very interesting article in the Financial Times today on the subject of “spoofing” – the practice of entering and cancelling orders in rapid succession to manipulate the prices of shares, bonds or commodities. The article was headlined “US regulators step up battle with spoofing” and mentioned the $920m fine imposed on JPMorgan Chase this week. Apparently the company’s traders had been using this abusive practice for years. The size of the fine should surely deter the practice if companies can actually control their traders.
This practice is not just confined to the USA of course. It was also alleged to have taken place in Burford shares recently. It just needs large transaction volumes in an order book system to make it viable.
It is symptomatic of the sharp practices that are rampant in the financial world. It is of course a practice to be abhorred as it creates a false market in the shares of a company. It suggests that there are buyers or sellers queuing up to buy or sell the stock, and a general impression of activity when none might exist.
Why not put a stop to it by imposing a time limit before an order can be cancelled?
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right in most browsers or by using the Contact page to send us a message requesting. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.
© Copyright. Disclaimer: Read the About page before relying on any information in this post.