The description “Private Investors” is a wide-ranging one term covering everyone from the industry professional investing his own money right down to students investing their student loans and grandparents trying to stretch their pensions further.

Just like any other disparate group of individuals, within the group there are those who are extremely well researched about their investments and those who are not so well researched. However, in our experience the latter outweigh the former by over 10:1 meaning that many PI’s are remarkably ill-informed about the stocks that they are invested in – particularly around the financial figures about what their investment is and could be worth.

The fact that so many private investors are relatively ill-informed about their investments means that when positive or negative events occur the community is never sure what the company is worth and this can lead to panic that is often manipulated by unscrupulous individuals and groups that spread untrue rumours at these key times to drive PI sentiment for their own ends.

Educating Investors

Our mission is to educate Private Investors about the value of their investments to ensure that when they make the decision to buy or sell shares they are doing it from a position of knowledge and sense.

As well as ensuring that PI’s are as well briefed as possible before they enter an investment Petrarch will also intervene at key points in both the positive and negative cycles to ensure that private investor sentiment reflects the salient facts about the company. This helps to maximise good news and stabilise the share value, and minimise bad news whilst maintaining that stability.

It's crucial to remember that in times of stress often a company’s internal media and external PR groups are busy fielding concerns from other investor classes and do not have the time to help the smaller investor deal with their concerns – meaning that they often get ignored.