#238311
Postby widowandorphan3 » July 21st, 2019, 11:12 pm
What a Godawful, hideous mess this is.
If you have skin in the WEIF game, my sympathies. If you don't, be grateful for a bullet swerved. Truth is, he'll have to try and sell nearly everything. For the quoted stuff, painful and may not get the prices he'd like, but still doable over time.
But the unquoted stuff... well anyone in the market for them might reasonably think of a number and halve it, given they know WEIF is a forced seller. There may well be some would be/could be winners in there that other folk desire, but in truth I don't have the knowledge about the companies or the industries they operate in.
What I do know is that selling when you have to is a weak negotiating position, from the off. A friend inherited a nice London property a while back, and arranged a sale and price; about 3 days before closing, his buyer tried to haircut him 10% (maybe £150k) - he told them to do one; what he knew and they apparently didn't was that he didn't *need* to sell it. He sold it to someone else for the same dosh shortly after, after the original buyer had wasted £££s on surveys and lawyers.
But I digress.
The current WEIF value is £0.96, around 4% less than when it started 5 years ago. Easy to forget that in its first year, it did around +22%, only marginally behind Mr Smith (+24%), a performance that doubtless sucked in more cash. But back then, WEIF was chock full of 'baccy, Unilever type stuff. It seems to have slowly transformed into at least in part a private equity fund, but many investors didn't notice (and I suspect may not have been minded to notice as they thought it was a 'buy and forget' fund, or they were widows and orphans).
I suspect it will not reopen for many months, and when it does, it will have to be wound up. Where its final price will end up, who knows? The contrarian in me agrees with NW that UK stocks are historically undervalued, but historically we didn't have Brexit to factor in which enormously complicates matters (though a few years down the road may well be seen as massive buying opp).
In time thus, WEIF's holdings may come good, but time is something Woodford doesn't have.
WaO
Last edited by
widowandorphan3 on July 21st, 2019, 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.