We are looking for volume sellers (minimum 200 shares, ideally 1000+ shares) to place bids to us to buy their shares. Should we buy, it will be from the lowest prices seller(s).
We have buyers for potentially 5,000 shares if the prices we are offered are low enough.
We already have sufficient shares offered to us at slightly below £6.00 so your bid will have to be lower to have a chance of successfully selling your shares.
We will close this page once we have received sufficient offers, and let every bidder know the outcome of their bid.
We WILL NOT publicly disclose the prices of successful sellers.
IMPORTANT: YOU MUST READ ALL THE FOLLOWING, TO ENSURE YOU UNDERSTAND THE PROCESS, AND TO HAVE A CHANCE OF SELLING YOUR SHARES.
Selling your Private Equity in BrewDog is not an easy process.
Private equities are usually kept long term, and until an official exit is provided by the company, such as a Stock Market listing, or buy-back.
We can all sell and buy, as long as we are willing to give it the necessary time, effort and care.
We have tried to make the process as simple as possible, but YOU NEED TO READ THIS PAGE VERY CAREFULLY, or you will fail to sell.
About half of the people who have asked us to buy their shares in the past have failed to sell. Even after we agreed to buy.
They failed to read ALL the information we provided, or clicked the tick boxes in our Forms, without understanding the importance of their answers.
The detail is further down this page but here is a checklist that you must have ready, BEFORE asking us to buy your shares:
1. ALL the shares you wish to offer us MUST be at ComputerShare, with valid share certificates available to you. We are private traders, NOT a broker, so we cannot buy from any other custodian or broker. If your shares are with Jarvis, Asset Match or any other custodian, you must get them into a ComputerShare account BEFORE we can buy from you.
2. You must have access to the ComputerShare account, and details of titles, names and registered address there MUST be up to date. It does not matter if the share certificate(s) show an old address.
3. You MUST be able to email VALID PDF SHARE CERTIFICATE(S) to neil@brewdogshares.com as soon as we request, should you be successful in your bid to sell. They must have been downloaded recently, and we cannot make you an offer to buy until we know that you have valid share certificates.
If you have used a share certificate before, such as to transfer shares to Jarvis for the official trading event, IT WILL BE INVALID, and you need to send the new one created when the shares returned to your ComputerShare account.
No other form of evidence of your share ownership is acceptable.
4. ALL shareholders listed in the account must be over the age of 18, and able to sign a Stock Transfer Form that we will create for you.
If any shareholders are not able to sign the form, we cannot buy from you.
5. You must be able to respond to emails at very short notice, but you must also have patience, as the process can take anything from 10 to 20 weeks, AFTER we have agreed to buy.
The timings of our sales and purchases are vital to ensure we keep to HMRC recommendations for trading shares.
We cannot buy from anyone who fails to follow instructions carefully.
If you are at all unsure about us, and our ability to buy your shares honestly and fairly, DO NOT ASK US TO BUY.
Neil (@Neil_Fletcher) can be found on the closed, (for registered investors only), BrewDog Investors Forum, for those understandably concerned about dealing with strangers on the internet.
You must be logged in to your EFP account at www.brewdog.com to access the Forum.
We cannot help you with access to ComputerShare. You must contact them direct.
If you are having any difficulties, you can email BrewDog at equitypunks@brewdog.com who may be able to help you.
We do not work for either ComputerShare or BrewDog, and are just investors who got lucky by buying into the company in 2010, and then learned how to sell and buy the shares 😉
BrewDog and ComputerShare are fully aware of our buying and selling, and BrewDog has encouraged us to help our fellow investors in selling and buying.
We hope to make Capital Gains from what we do, and we will pay our taxes on it, if we do.
Nobody will do this for you for free. Not even Neil, on a good day!
There are nearly always more sellers offering shares, than buyers willing to pay for them.
If you do it wrong, or answer untruthfully, we will buy from someone else, and you will have wasted your time and ours.
An honest answer to every question in our forms is vital for a successful transfer, and we do not pay until your shares have transferred to our accounts.
There is more important information and some FAQs lower down this page.
The form below is for selling a minimum of 200 shares.
You will need a valid Share Certificate, downloaded from your ComputerShare account recently, to be able to offer your shares to us.
NO other form of ‘proof’ of share ownership is acceptable.
Forget old paper certificates, scans, photocopies, screenshots or photos, statements or anything else.
It has to be the pdfs.
No one can use your certificate without an original Stock Transfer Form, printed off and signed in ink by the shareholders.
ONLY GENUINE PDF FILES RECENTLY DOWNLOADED FROM THE DOCUMENTS SECTION OF A COMPUTERSHARE ACCOUNT ARE ACCEPTABLE.
THEY MUST BE VALID, AND CANNOT HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN USED FOR ANY TRANSACTION, SUCH AS A TRANSFER TO JARVIS.
If your shares are still with Jarvis, or any custodian other than ComputerShare, we cannot buy shares, so there is no point in completing this form.
If you cannot complete all of the form, then you are not ready to sell your shares. Ensure that you have your ComputerShare account accessible, up to date with any title, name or address changes, and that you are able to obtain the physical signatures from all shareholders, who must also all be over the age of 18, before you ask anyone to buy your shares.
Any information you provide will be treated in the strictest confidence, and by submitting the form below you agree to treat any information we provide to you in the same manner.
Read every question carefully, and answer honestly.
The selling and buying process is complicated, and if you answer incorrectly you may waste a lot of our time and yours, and still not sell your shares.
We cannot make you an offer to buy your shares until we have proof that you have valid share certificates.
Important information:
You can only sell your BrewDog UK plc B Class shares to us if you have access to your ComputerShare Account and it is up to date.
This is not the same as your BrewDog Forum Account!
If you have shares at TheShareCentre (share.com), Jarvis, or any other custodian, you will need to transfer them to ComputerShare before we can buy from you.
See my other page for more information on ComputerShare if you do not know what it is:
https://www.brewdogshares.com/home/computershare-investor-centre-information/
We cannot buy from you otherwise, however cheaply you offer your shares.
Share trades take a long time to process as the paperwork is hard copy and goes through several processes.
However, the decisions buyers and sellers make often have to be taken quickly, so immediate access to your shareholding at short notice, and responses to any enquiries have to be made very quickly.
If you fail to respond to an email by just a few hours, you may miss out on an opportunity to sell.
If you are having trouble accessing ComputerShare you should email equitypunks@brewdog.com for assistance, not us!
Give them as much information as possible in your email, such as name, address and shareholder number.
There is also help on ComputerShare’s own web page: ComputerShare Investor Centre
We cannot do this for you.
Please complete the form above so that we can be ready to make an offer to buy your shares from you, if your price is acceptable, and we decide to buy them from you.
We will acknowledge receipt, and come back to you with further information once we have received enough offers to make a General Sale a feasible option.
We will buy the shares of the lowest priced sellers first, and cannot guarantee to buy until we have made an offer, and you have completed the paperwork we will provide to you.
This can mean that even if your price is below what we will buy for, your shares will not sell if other people have offered their shares cheaper than you, or earlier than you.
We can never guarantee to be able to buy your shares until we have sold enough of our own first.
There are no sellers fees, and the price we offer is the price we pay.
(Less any bank charges for international payments, or for additional printing and postage you may request.)
FAQs
Can you advise me of the best price to put in, to be able to sell my shares?
No. Only you can pick a price that you are happy with.
We will not tell anyone else what price you put down, and we won’t tell you theirs either 😉
If your price is low, you have a much better chance of selling, as we occasionally get large buyers approaching us with a fixed price in mind. If your price is low enough, this is how your shares will sell more quickly
The vast majority of the 190,000+ shares we have sold have been traded this way.
We will sell some shares at higher prices in a General Sale, but the volumes traded for the hours of work involved are very small.
Will you negotiate on price?
No. To be fair to everyone we deal with, you have to give us your minimum price. You can change this at any time up to the point where we come to an agreement to buy your shares.
We keep a list of sellers in the following order:
1) Cheapest first.
2) Order the offer was received.
If your price goes up, we will put you further back on the list of people we’re buying from, and take the next person’s shares instead. If your price comes down, you will get closer to the front.
If we agree to buy someone’s shares, we will always keep to the deal. Even if another seller comes along and offers the shares cheaper.
Why will you not buy less than 200 shares?
It is simply not cost effective for us to buy in smaller quantities.
Private Equities like BrewDog can only be traded using a time consuming and complex hard-copy paperwork system.
They are not designed to be easily bought and sold, but rather to be held until the company itself offers an exit method, such as a Stock Market Listing.
Do you operate like an Official BrewDog Trading Day?
No. We cannot. We are not a licenced Broker, so have to sell by keeping to HMRC’s Share Trading Guidelines. We usually sell using Same Day, or Bed & Breakfasting methods.
You can find more information here: Link to HMRC Share Trading Guidance
I see you selling shares for a lot more money than you are offering to buy them for. How do you work out what you can pay others?
We hold General Sales for buyers of up to 500 shares, or more, if there is high demand. The prices are worked out using the Asset Match fee structure for buyers and sellers. Most buyers are buying on average just over 20 shares. That is a lot of time and paperwork for a very small margin.
If a lot of shares are being traded, it is more than enough to cover our costs, time and risks.
When very few shares are being traded, we need a much bigger margin to cover the time it takes to run a general sale. Usually the equivalent of 6 to 8 weeks paid work.
The vast majority of shares we sell, and buy back, are traded in multiples of over 500 shares, with a margin considerably smaller than for a general sale. Bear in mind that we also cover Stamp Duty both ways.
Is this a business?
No. It is a hobby that ran away with itself!
We would prefer people to sell for themselves if they possibly can.
(See the guide Neil wrote on the BrewDog Forum.)
Eventually, there will be either a public listing for the company or a way of trading on CrowdCube etc., and when/if that happens there will be nobody happier than us.
However, we keep to all the rules of Stamp Duty, Money Laundering, Data Protection, Capital Gains Tax etc. and if we make enough profits (which also include selling any of our own shares) then we pay our taxes.
Neil is an HMRC registered Tax Agent, so we always stick to the letter and spirit of the laws.