Share Valuation

A question about : Share Valuation

My Dad's estate has holdings of a number of different shares, mostly FTS100 / 250. All of them are on personally held certificates, rather than through nominees, so at the weekend I despatched umpteen letters to umpteen registrars with umpteen death certificates, asking for confirmation of the holding and any dividends due at DoD.

I'm conscious that I have to value these at DoD on the IHT400 when I get to that point, and it occurred to me that there were probably web based services around that would do that for me. A quick Google turned up netsharevalue.co.uk, which seems not ridiculously priced at Ј3.65 per holding. Has anyone experience of using services like this? Strikes me that this - and the basis of the calculation - is public domain info, and there might be more straightforward ways to get hold of it...

Best answers:

• Check out the Financial Times - you'll need the edition the day after the DoD - which will give you that day's prices.
  I used to do Stock & Share valuations for Probate - but that was forty-five years ago!
  I remember the basis was different from the pricing for standard valuations. Perhaps a call to the local Tax Office for advice.
  How did he buy & sell shares, was it on-line or through a broker?
  They could do the valuation, though perhaps depends on what they'd charge!!?
  HTHs
• You need to find the mid price for each holding. The information may not be available without subscription. Somebody will now prove me wrong!
• Hmm. My understanding was that it was a little more complex than that - specifically, that listed shares should be valued on the basis of the lower of:
• Closing (mid) price for the day and add a quarter of the difference between buy and sell at close
• Median between highest and lowest price recorded for the day

Necessarily, you also need to account for a share being ex-div on the DoD.
Given the faff of calculating this, I could live with paying Ј3.65 per quote - I just wondered whether anyone offered it pre-calculated for free somewhere!

• It will be over the IHT threshold. But, it seems to me, the closing price in the FT - which will be the mid-price, unless they quote Buy and Sell, is not enough: You need Buy/Sell - and you need to know the high/low for the mid-price during the days trading...
  Which is why I'm inclined to pay for it, assuming these services do calculate it correctly. It's nothing that a bit of Excel can't deal with, but you do need the right data in the first place...
• I used this site to get free valuations recently London Stock Exchange
  The estate I was dealing with had shares worth circa Ј20,000 and was liable for considerable IHT.
  The values were accepted without question.
• IME on-line valuations were acceptable values for HMRC.
  I used HL and yahoo historic tables.