Hielko

I have never reclaimed taxes in France, but I believe that one is doable. See here for the form that needs to be completed: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/files/formulaires/5001-sd/2018/5001-sd_2281.pdf My Dutch broker now even offers support to apply for lower withholding taxes in advance for French companies, similar to what is possible with the W8-BEN in the US. But think they are the exception, and most brokers don't offer this. To reclaim taxes I believe you still need cooperation from your broker since they need to sign to form or provide an official dividend statement or something along those lines. Then you probably need to get the form signed by your local tax authority as well (to confirm that you are for tax purposes a resident of your country) and then you can send it to France and wait... (I have done successful tax reclaims in Sweden and Belgium, no experience with other countries).

Or what about Apple. Think there are really a lot of examples

I would guess that you probably already know more about accounting than you need for investing.

Who would have thought, it actually makes sense! :)

No. Because you are also reducing the return number of the ROIC by the depreciation. If you use the return number that contains depreciation and then asset value that doesn't you just get something weird. And sure, these calculations are always imperfect. Straight line (or other method) depreciation is in the end always an accounting construct, not reality.

Their daily new cases have been stabilizing for a week now, and I think their testing capacity has been going up, so it's possible they are now finding a higher percentage of the infected (so effectively there is already a decline). Their numbers aren't pretty, but for sure a lot better than it could have been with exponential growth.

Still very hard to interpreted that data. Because presumably a lot of the reported cases are people who just got infected, just got sick, are just admitted to the hospital etc. Only in 3 or 4 weeks time you will know how many deaths there are from the current sample of 3346 cases. But that's something you can only track if you get case by case information, and you won't have that.

I'm EXTREMELY disappointed that it seems like there will be an easy way to get liquidity. I really was hoping for a cool adventure where you needed to go to Cameroon to deliver physical certificates in person, getting paid cash in central African franc. Getting some shady local dealer to exchange it to dollars etc. So much potential!

I think switching to a different broker will not solve your problems. Tender offers made outside the US are very often explicitly not made to residents of the US because small companies can't afford to comply with US regulations (Canada, Japan, Australia are other countries I often see explicitly excluded). I took a look at this tender offer, and while it doesn't explicitly exclude US residents it states that it is made only in France, from google translate: Odds that any broker is willing to submit your shares and that the company is willing to purchase your shares: 0.0001% (okay, that might be a bit too pessimistic) Besides that, writser is making some good points.

More like tiny company problems... and some ridiculous restrictions (even more than the other ones) on stock where I own just a handful of shares.

I have messages from David, Jozef, John and Joe. Wonder how many people they have working on this...

Interesting to see that results on COBF are sort of distributed normally (as expected), but that the mean/average of this years returns seems to be significantly below the index with the most people having a 20-25% outcome, not one, but two steps below the option that includes the index return.

I wouldn't be too concerned, at least not about the company just keeping your money. The tax issue is probably real, CVRs aren't a common structure so it's very probably there is some kind of disagreement with on how to treat this payment. And Israel is already one of the worst countries with regards to paperwork requirements with merger payments. So if they can't agree quickly, totally possible that this can drag out for a couple of years. Hope all the possibly lawyer and accountant costs aren't deducted from the CVR payment ;)

N+1

But if any private entity would have bailed out banks or Fannie Mae they would have required share holder approval and/or go through a bankruptcy process where bond holders, perf holders and equity would have had some say in the outcome. Where you alive during the Great Recession? (Jk) Bondholders would have accepted massive haircuts would have happily accepted a expedited bankruptcy process and equity holders would surely have no say (and wiped clean) in the bankruptcy of banks nor Fannie and Freddie. No way anyone would have argued with a white knight as people thought like the world was ending. Instead bondholders were made whole and equity holders still maintained some ownership share. During the GFC I was happily playing poker without looking at the stock market at all ;). But sure, probably plenty of bond holders would have accepted a big haircut at that time and be happy that they got anything at all. But the thing is, they didn't go bankrupt. And there would be no way of telling what would have happened if they did. There is no such thing as an expedited bankruptcy process, and if you look at how long for example the process of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is taking (it is still in progress as far as I know!!!) it is certainly possible that by the time they started selling assets the value of those assets recovered.