r/UkStocks

Hi, I am hoping People can help me with this matter.
 
My mother passed away in December 2025 and when I went through her paperwork, I found this share certificate for what appears to be 272 shares in the Commonwealth Bank Australia but they are still in my father's name who died in 2017. It seems that he purchased these shares sometime in the 1990s on the advice of his accountant as he was self-employed at the time and they appeared to be a better option than saving his money in a building society or bank. Obviously, she never transferred these into her own name after my father died but the account was definitely still active very recently as I have seen dividend payments (albeit very small ones) on her bank statement (which was once their joint account). I don’t remember my dad ever writing a will but I do know that everything he owned passed straight to my mum when he died.
 
We did discuss these shares (amongst others that are in her name) a few years ago when she was still alive but she didn't really know what to do with them and I never had time to pursue this at the time. My mother was not tech savvy and just kept saying to me that I apparently needed to “go online” to change them into her name. The only other paperwork I have for this is some paper statements that came annually. As she got older, she was reluctant to discuss finances much at all.
 
My question is: does anyone know what I need to do to close or liquidate this account? Can I just sell them back to the bank? Do they need to be transferred into my name first etc etc?
 
It seems that these shares are now administered by MUFG corporate markets limited in Australia though I'm sure they would have been purchased in the UK. I have emailed them once or twice but every e-mail takes two weeks to receive a reply and they seem to think I just want to transfer them into my name. I have two siblings so the ownership of these shares in theory needs to be split between the three of us and it would appear that the price for individual shares waivers around the $165AUD mark but I could be wrong about this as UK based shares seem to be priced in pence rather than pounds though as I read it these shares are priced in Australian dollars. I'm really just at a loss as to how to deal with this as I know very little (if anyone about stocks shares etc) so any advice would be gratefully received.  

A share price is revenue times net margin times the P/E multiple, divided by the share count. Ten years of price change can be split exactly into those four components with dividends on top as a fifth.

I did this for twelve well-known UK names, mid-2016 to mid-2026. Contributions below are annualised percentage points per year (continuously compounded, which is what makes them sum exactly; each figure is rounded to 0.1, so a row's pieces can differ from its printed total by 0.1), with dates anchored to the data window ending 2 July 2026.

Some of what the decomposition shows that the totals hide:

Games Workshop's £58 was mostly the business. Revenue contributed +17pp a year and margins +10pp. The multiple moving from 11.6x to 31.3x earnings added another +10pp, but even with no re-rating at all £1 was becoming roughly £21 (about £15 of that from the business alone, the rest dividends).

BAT's share price fell over the decade and holders still made 5.7% a year. On price alone, £1 became 94p. The whole return was the dividend (+6.2pp a year) outrunning a multiple that halved from 25x to 12x.

Diageo grew revenue 6.7% a year for ten years and holders still lost money. Margins gave back 5.9pp a year and the multiple another 5.3pp. Revenue growth on its own tells you very little about the return.

Reckitt puts a price on a de-rating. The move from 31x to under 10x earnings cost holders roughly 12pp a year, against a business that was contributing +6pp a year from revenue and margins combined.

Tesco shows what a turnaround looks like in this framework. Its 2016 earnings were depressed by the accounting scandal, so the P/E then was around 120x. Margins rebuilt at +23pp a year while that crisis multiple normalised at −20pp a year. Two enormous forces nearly cancelling, netting +15% a year.

Next compounded with barely any help from the business. Revenue and margins contributed +2.9pp a year; buybacks (+2.1), re-rating (+4.5) and dividends (+4.1) did the rest.

Standard yield screens show the dividend but not buybacks, so they understate the total cash returned for any company retiring a meaningful amount of stock.

This adds a buyback yield — the average annual reduction in share count over five years — to the trailing dividend yield, for London-listed companies above £2bn. The sum is the total cash returned to shareholders as a percentage of market value. Only companies with a steady, continuing reduction are included.

The leaders run from about 7% to 10%. NatWest and Shell top the list at 9.9% and 9.8%, each pairing a dividend above 3.5% with a buyback yield above 5%, and Imperial Brands reaches 9.1% on the largest dividend in the group at 5.8%. Smiths Group, Associated British Foods and Auto Trader trail the rest at 4.5–5.9%.

Standard Chartered is the clearest case for why the dividend alone understates the picture. It yields 1.6%, below the level most dividend screens would flag, but a reduction in share count of about a quarter over five years lifts the total close to 8%. Shell and Standard Chartered retired the most stock over the period, both around 27%.

A buyback only adds value per share if the stock is bought at a sensible price and the business is not shrinking faster than the share count. Barclays and Kingfisher trade below book value, where buybacks are more clearly accretive; others are returning cash while revenue is flat or falling, a weaker case.

How do you weigh a buyback against a dividend?

I took 14 well-known UK companies and plotted today's trailing P/E against each company's average P/E since 2015. At the top of the chart, for context, is the FTSE 100 itself: its trailing P/E rose from about 14.5x to 17.6x over the same period — so the wider market actually re-rated upward, while many of these household names went the other way.

Take BAE Systems: for most of the past decade it traded at around 19x earnings, and today it is about 27x, as the market pays a premium for defence earnings. 

Part of the fall for the first group reflects the unwinding of a strong period for these shares between roughly 2015 and 2021, when many traded at high multiples. A lower multiple than its own history does not by itself make a company cheap — Reckitt is on 10x partly because earnings have been weak. Equally, a higher one is not automatically expensive — BAE now sits on 27x with a stronger outlook for defence budgets and a far larger order book than a decade ago. The question, in either direction, is whether the earlier multiple or the current one is the anomaly.

Which of these look mispriced to you, in either direction?

For the past year my co-founder and I have been building Openbook Analytics, a stock research and portfolio analytics platform for UK retail investors.

We weren't satisfied with the tools out there for retail investors, so we built Openbook Analytics to be a clean, simple way to find and analyse stocks. 

Every stock gets scored across factors like growth, value, momentum and profitability, with a separate risk read based on volatility, solvency, operational quality and size. 

What's there so far:

Stock Analysis. Every UK and US stock & ETF, getting OEICs and Mutual Funds soon.

Stock screener. Filter by the factors you care about, or a blend of them.

Portfolio tracker & analysis. Beyond holdings, it shows your factor exposure, concentration risk, and what your portfolio is most sensitive to.

Market News. We write regularly on UK names and market themes.

There's also a stock-picking competition between users.

We're early, so I'd rather hear what's broken or missing now than in six months. Access is completely free for the next two weeks, no card needed, so you can use all the features properly before forming a view.

If you're a UK investor, I'd value any honest reaction. What's useful, what's not, and what would make you actually stay with Openbook Analytics.

Here's the link, we hope you like it:
https://www.openbookanalytics.com/

A profit margin quoted as a single number hides whether the company can actually hold it. So instead of one figure, I pulled the operating margin for every reported year since 2014 and drew it as a box plot to visualise the extremes and the norm.

Looking at the baseline for UK companies, we see the typical listed UK company earns a median operating margin of about 9%.

At the steady end, Rightmove has held 66% to 74% every year of the decade, and RELX, Next, Unilever, BAE and Greggs all sit in tight ranges at lower levels. Tesco and Sainsbury's keep only 2 to 4p in the pound but barely move either, which is its own kind of quality. At the cyclical end the ranges are wide: Persimmon 11% to 28% across the housing cycle, Shell a small loss to 11%, Centrica a small loss to 26% through the energy crisis, and easyJet a 26% loss to an 11% profit.

The point is that the level tells you how much a business keeps, and the spread tells you how reliably. A margin that holds through a decade is worth more than a big one that doesn't.

If there are comparisons you'd like to see, name them and I'll chart them.

Hi everyone,

This question is for UK stock day traders or anyone familiar with the UK stock market.

If you open the 5-minute or 15-minute chart of almost any FTSE 100 stock, you'll often notice very long wicks appearing during normal trading hours. This seems to happen almost every day across many UK stocks.

For example, if you look at the chart of BP (British Petroleum), you'll see what I mean.

I'm curious about what's causing this. These can't all be "freak trades" if they occur so frequently.

How do UK day traders deal with these long wicks? What's the actual reason behind them? Are they caused by low liquidity, large institutional orders, auction mechanisms, off-book trades, market makers, or something else?

I'd really appreciate any insights from traders who actively trade UK stocks.

2026-JUN-01, 2026-JUN-24, 2026-MAY-06, 5 mins chart screenshots are included for your reference.