Number cruncher

A tenacious investor approached IPSO to correct the presentation of share price data in The Times

This article is reproduced from the IPSO Annual Report 2023.

You can read or download a copy of the full annual report here.

Ken Hodgson, a chartered accountant before he retired, began investing in 1947 with a ￡50 gift from his grandfather. Just two years earlier, the London Stock Exchange had been forced to close (for the only time during the Second World War) when it was hit by a V2 rocket.

"I just got interested in business and investment and how the market works. It's been a hobby throughout my life," he told us, "both enjoyable and interesting."

For more than 70 years, Mr Hodgson has used financial information presented by The Times to make decisions about which stocks to buy or sell. But for a number of years, he had noticed there was something wrong with some of the yield data presented by the newspaper. The dividend yield is a percentage figure that tells investors how much a company will pay out in dividend to shareholders relative to the price of its shares. It helps investors to compare returns from different investments and can give clues about a company’s performance. To calculate the dividend yield, the dividend per share is divided by the price per share.

"The IPSO ruling is an important decision that helps the public – particularly the small investor”

Citing Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors' Code of Practice, Mr Hodgson complained to IPSO about what he identified as an ongoing issue in The Times Money pages. As part of his complaint, he provided the Dividend Yields listing from 9 July 2022, but noted that the error was not an isolated one - rather, what he had provided was simply one example of an ongoing issue with how the paper's dividend yield figures were calculated.

“I wrote to IPSO and set out the facts... I must express how important it is for the unsophisticated investor who needs the correct figure to make the right decisions.” He provided another’s publication’s dividend yields listing that he considered correct as a point of comparison

“Even if you’ve got your portfolio managed by someone else, each day it’s a place to look: you don’t buy or sell unless you know the dividend and the price earnings ratio. And it’s good for all of us just to glance through and look at the figures, decide if we’re going to sell or buy and therefore it’s an important tool. I said they were giving the wrong information that was more than a year out of date.”

IPSO’s Complaints Committee noted that it was a complex issue which had not been addressed by either the publication or the financial services firm, although the complainant had contacted them directly, before he complained to IPSO.

It was clear that Mr Hodgson had made the publication aware of the inaccuracies in the data, but it had continued to publish it over several years, and there was now no dispute that the current figures were inaccurate. So, this represented a failure to take care over the accuracy of the data and meant a breach of Clause 1.

The Committee also concluded that given the nature and prominence of the breach, the prominence of a correction offered by the publication during IPSO’s investigation was not on its own sufficient.

It also noted that the explanation of the methodology had been inaccurate. The Complaints Committee ruled that given the seriousness and longstanding breach of Clause 1, the publication of a summary of the Committee’s findings should be published by The Times. It would be published in the relevant money section, to make it more likely to be seen by readers affected by an inaccuracy, and should make clear that IPSO had upheld the complaint against The Times.

Mr Hodgson was very pleased with the outcome: “If you invest it’s essential that you know what you buy. The IPSO ruling in ensuring what is printed in The Times on dividend yield is correct is an important decision that helps the public – particularly the small investor.”

Read this story and others in the IPSO Annual Report 2023.