Status: 11/12/2021 8:16 am
The days of Wirecard shares on the stock exchange are numbered. According to experts, it is now high time to act for investors who still own the scandalous company’s paper.
The deep fall of the Wirecard share made history. In September 2018, investors paid a peak of 199 euros for one Wirecard share. Today the paper is a so-called penny stock, only in October it hit a record low at just under 14 cents. The payment processor filed for bankruptcy in June 2020 after the biggest economic scandal in German post-war history was uncovered.
Horrified, many investors then removed the share from their portfolios. But in some depots the paper is still likely to lead a shadowy existence today – as “zombie shares”. After all, the Wirecard share is almost worthless today, so why is it worth the effort of selling it?
Only tradable until November 15th
In fact, there are now good reasons for the remaining Wirecard shareholders to act and sell their “custody accounts”. Time is of the essence: Deutsche Börse will remove the Wirecard shares from its offer in regulated stock exchange trading at the end of November 15.
Even in the open market, the share will then no longer be tradable, as a group spokeswoman said at the request of tagesschau.de explained. From November 16, the shares can no longer be bought or sold on the German stock exchange. Other stock exchanges are following suit, so trading in Wirecard shares will also cease on November 15th on the Stuttgart Stock Exchange.
After being kicked out of the DAX, this closes another stock market chapter for Wirecard. This has consequences – for the price determination, the tradability of the share and the tax offsetting options for losses.
Investor advocates alerted
“Anyone who wants to trade Wirecard shares in the future will have to switch to the largely unregulated open market. How long this will work is completely open,” said Marc Tüngler, General Manager of the German Protection Association for Securities Ownership (DSW).
As soon as the paper leaves regulated trading, the price trend is likely to become even more erratic. The price determination will be much more difficult, the same applies to the sale of larger positions, so the investor advocate. “Affected shareholders should now more than ever think about selling the shares.”
The problem with the steering wheel
A sale makes sense for shareholders, especially from a tax point of view. Because in this way, the losses suffered with Wirecard can be offset against profits from other share sales. Shareholders then have to pay correspondingly less withholding tax.
In principle, investors also have the option of writing off shares because they are worthless; so you can save the transaction costs incurred in a sale. But this approach has a huge catch, at least for larger investments: The losses realized in this way can only be claimed up to 20,000 euros since January 1, 2020. The DSW expert also points this out.